Renault aims to produce a 'mini Ferrari' with its Alpine subbrand

Renault's Italian-born CEO, Luca de Meo, has an impossible-sounding ambition: to build a sports-car brand barely brought back to life into a Ferrari fighter.

Alpine, the 65-year-old French marque that Renault revived only a few years ago after two decades of dormancy, is a long way from striking fear into the hearts of de Meo's peers. Renault has sold barely more than a thousand A110 sports cars -- the brand's only current model line -- this year.

But while the veteran auto executive has said he thinks 30 percent of Renault's product range belongs in the scrapheap, he sees Alpine as ripe for expansion.

One of the first big moves made since he took over as CEO was to re-brand Renault's Formula One team as Alpine starting with the 2021 season.

De Meo, 53, claimed to reporters last week that if he combines the cutting-edge engineering work Renault's motorsports program does with the "quasi-artisanal" work conducted at the company's Alpine factory in northern France, "you could get a mini Ferrari."

To get others talking about Alpine in the same breath as the Italian supercar maker, de Meo has lots of work to do building up the brand's scale and status.

Renault Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard has singled out the Dieppe plant that produces Alpines as representative of the automaker's problems with overcapacity in Europe. Senard told French lawmakers in June that building seven cars a day at a site capable of making 32 is not sustainable.

And while Alpines are not cheap, with the higher-performance A110S starting at 67,900 euros ($79,500) in France, Ferrari's least-expensive models command more than $200,000.

Renault could certainly use the Alpine brand coming anywhere close to realizing de Meo's ambition. The automaker lost a record 7.3 billion euros in the first half and has at times looked on the verge of breaking up with its longtime alliance partner, Nissan, since the 2018 arrest of their former leader, Carlos Ghosn.

Renault mainly competes in Europe's mass market, which has been plagued for years by multiple brands competing for low-margin business.

Ghosn saw resurrecting Alpine -- which had been abandoned in 1995, one year before the company hired him -- as a way to bring panache to Renault's product range.

Worldwide sales of the A110 have underwhelmed since they began in late 2017, peaking at just 4,835 last year.

De Meo has dropped a few hints about where the brand will go next, saying last week it will "add emotion" to Renault's electric lineup.

In a memo to staff last month, he called for Alpine to embark on a "Porsche 911 program" and spawn a small series of viable EVs. For all the high-end brands he has compared Renault's sports-car brand with, de Meo said the company will be humble about its plans.

"It wouldn't be reasonable to think we can do 1 million cars with Alpine," he said.