Chinese auto giant Geely already has its fingers in a few European pies. It owns Volvo, Polestar, and Lotus outright and has stakes in both Mercedes and Aston Martin. But now it’s being linked with another premium name: Alpine.
The Renault-owned sports car company has spent the last six years pushing just one car, the critically acclaimed but slow-selling A110. The next six years are going to be radically different, as Alpine goes EV-only and expands to offer hot hatches, crossovers, and SUVs as well as a successor to the A110. It will also potentially launch into America and China with the hope of achieving €8 billion ($8.7 bn) in revenue by the end of the decade.
But that kind of bold expansion plan requires a ton of investment and one of the investors Renault is considering is Geely. It’s early days in the hunt for cash, CEO Philippe Krief telling Bloomberg that the search for new investors probably won’t start until the end of 2024 or early in 2025. But the Chinese firm, who has already teamed up with Renault to build hybrid powertrains for use elsewhere in the Renault empire, is definitely in the running.
“Geely is part of the group and we are looking at things with them,” Krief said, while making clear that there were other jobs were higher up the to-do list. “The priority for 2024 is to formalize Alpine‘s product and industrial plan,” he added.
Related: Alpine Confirms Next-Gen A110 Roadster For 2030’s Seven-Strong EV Lineup
Any Geely involvement with Alpine could potentially bring the French sports car company and Lotus back into the same orbit. Alpine and Lotus were working on a future electric sports car project together, but Alpine recently pulled out to go it alone, claiming it wanted to develop its own Alpine Performance Platform (APP) architecture.
Alpine’s big plans include producing no less than seven new cars by 2030, the first of which is the Renault 5-based A290 hot hatch, a production version of the A290B prototype that debuted earlier this year (seen in the gallery below). That goes on sale in 2024 and will be followed a year later by a C-segment crossover GT, and the all-new A110 in 2026, the year Alpine claims it will break even and make €2 billion in revenue.
Other future models include an A110 Spider, an A310 four-seat coupe built from the same architecture, and a pair of D- and E-segment cars that will probably be targeted at the Porsche Macan and Cayenne and have been linked with platform and powertrain technology borrowed from…Geely.
