First electric Alpine model breaks cover
Shortly after his arrival at the Renault Group, Luca de Meo commented: “I want to electrify Alpine to preserve its name for all eternity”. In less than a year, a team of designers and engineers turned that comment into reality and, to top it off, even grasped the opportunity of removing the roof at the same time.
The 100% electric A110 E-ternité is the result of that development work, bridging a prestigious past to a 100% electric future and illustrating the work which Alpine is currently doing to develop its range of new models.
For more than ten years, Renault Group has been a pioneer in the field of electric vehicles and has acquired a wealth of valuable experience in all areas of the automotive industry. It was therefore quite natural that the Alpine teams began thinking about the subject very early on.
The arrival of Luca de Meo and the announcement of a 100% electric range at Alpine gave a clear direction for the work of the teams and an opportunity to work on electrics in an exploratory way. The target was clear: to electrify the next Alpine vehicles, starting with the A110, known for its light weight and agility, within a realistic budget.
The battery modules are identical to those of the 100% electric Mégane E-Tech. However, to achieve optimum weight distribution and to accommodate the twelve battery modules, it was necessary to design specific battery casings for the A110 and to adapt the internal architecture. Four modules were therefore placed at the front and eight at the rear. Despite the addition of these twelve modules, the total weight of the Alpine A110 E-ternité remains particularly light with an increase of only 258 kg, thanks to a contained mass for the battery pack of 392 kg.
In order to get away from the 0 to 100kph / top speed trade-off and the constant quest for electric storage that requires large batteries, an innovative gearbox was added to the Group’s “standard” motor.
The gearbox was developed in-house, together with the Alpine gearbox supplier, in a double clutch version (DCT) with an electronic control, as used on the A110 combustion engine but with clutches dimensioned to handle high levels of torque. The double clutch solution makes it possible to avoid a break in torque while remaining compact and light.
Alpine also decided to take on an additional challenge at the same time. The difficulty was above all to find the solution to quickly integrate a removable roof on the structure of the Alpine A110. The Alpine engineers came up with a simple and light solution, without impacting the rigidity of the production A110, with two roof shells injected with recycled carbon, designed and built entirely in-house.
Alpine engineering made it a priority to develop a vehicle that is as beautiful as it is efficient. The team succeeded in combining the design requirements with the electronic architecture ones. The solution: the wiring was done directly with the dashboard and the same interface computer was used. The result lives up to expectations and also integrates:
- a state-of-the-art audio system with 8 speakers including a subwoofer to recreate a surrounding sound thanks to one central and two rear new speakers.
- an innovative multimedia system using the driver's personal tablet as the multimedia screen, in order to display the usual environment and apps of the user. This solution provides an always up-to-date operating system combined with the latest screen technologies.
Both lightweight and more environmentally friendly, the materials used on some key parts are made from flax. A second E-ternité demo-car was also developed and displays this new technology applied to parts such as the skin of the bonnet, roof, rear window, grille, seat shells and rear skirt. The material comes from the Terre de Lin company based near Dieppe (Normandy, France). As strong as carbon-fibre and with better acoustics, flax is seen a material of the future.
This new experience also makes it possible to prepare for the future. Indeed, the design of the parts is now compatible with the various composite materials, which means that the same mould can be used to produce carbon, glass or flax fibre composite.
