Alpine A610
Why 5.7: A steel backbone chassis with glassfibre panels, pop-up headlights, and a turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 slung out behind the rear axle exactly where a 911 keeps its flat-six. 250 PS, 350 Nm from 2,900 rpm, 265 km/h, and 818 cars built in four years.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
A 90-degree V6 hung out behind the rear axle barks over your shoulder rather than through a bulkhead, which nothing mid-engined reproduces. But a single turbocharger sits between the exhaust and you, and the PRV was a shared Peugeot-Renault-Volvo economy V6 before Alpine got it. Position doing the work.
6-cylinder · turbocharged · 6,000 rpm redline · rated 5.9 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €51k (1992) → €57k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation, and the belt geometry of the period was not designed with one in mind.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The A610 is what Alpine built when Renault finally let it modernise the GTA, and it is the better car by every measure that can be written down. The V6 grew to three litres and 250 PS, the body was reworked properly with pop-up headlights in place of the GTA's fixed glass, the chassis was stiffened, and the whole thing will still do 265 km/h. It arrived in 1991 into a market that had stopped caring: Renault had pulled out of North America in 1987 and the federalised GTA that had been planned for it died with that decision, so the A610 was Europe-only from birth and sold into a segment where a Porsche 968 or a 911 carried a badge people could place. 818 were built at Dieppe, 67 of them right-hand drive, and Renault shut the line in 1995. The Alpine name then went dormant for twenty-two years — Dieppe kept building Renault Sport specials, but no car wore the badge again until the A110 in 2017. That is what makes this entry worth having and also what caps its score: 818 cars means every survivor is a known quantity in a small community, the market has firmed up hard since the A110 revived interest in the marque, and they get used carefully rather than often. It is a genuinely quick, genuinely strange rear-engined GT that most people have never seen in the metal.