SPY PICS: Hybrid for Renault Alpine

It's wearing a sticker and what appears to be a recharging port behind the passenger's (right-hand) door, but this pre-production mule is not Tesla's long-awaited second-generation Roadster
– despite the obvious Lotus design link.

No, the 'Exige' here is actually a Renault Alpine mule undergoing tests in southern Spain. The spy photographers at Automedia believe this car is proof positive that the sporty French brand will market and sell hybrid models as well as conventional cars. It has been rumoured over some several months that Alpine will build SUVs and hybrids, so this mule could be confirmation of that.

However, the port and sticker would normally be the sort of accoutrements any self-respecting car company would attempt to conceal on a pre-production car likely to be caught in the field and photographed. It's not certain then, that this is necessarily a hybrid at all.

In fact, since Renault has links to Lotus, and Tesla formally sold an electric-powered sports car designed by Lotus, wouldn't tacking a recharging port on the side of a new test vehicle help Renault throw snoopy spy photographers off the track?

That sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory of course. Developing a plug-in Alpine sports car would make perfect sense in the 21st Century if Renault intends for Alpine to be a volume-selling brand in Europe as tougher emissions legislation takes hold.

And developing a plug-in hybrid in parallel with a conventional sports car would help explain the delay in bringing a production Alpine to market.