Alpha Motors is a bit of an enigma at present. It keeps revealing cute, perky EVs that combine retro appeal with a chunky, simplistic styling that has the charm of a great toy car come to life. Except they haven’t quite come to life yet. The Ace, Jax, Wolf, Wolf+, and now the Saga sedan are mostly just ideas, although the Wolf has a full-size model version that real human beings have actually laid eyes on at the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles.
Alpha’s hope, we presume, is that a continual drumbeat of cool ideas and lifelike renderings—great renderings, to be sure—may garner the backers needed to bring these vehicles to life. It’s the startup-VC dance, something we’re quite used to seeing, and until something rolls off a production line somewhere, there are no guarantees.
While we ponder the stark reality of getting into the auto biz, let’s put our guard down for a second and just admire the cheeky Saga as an idea rather than a solicitation for funds. It is clearly related to the shorter Ace visually, but its quad round headlight front fascia is different from the Ace’s, which has a vintage, rectangular-sealed-beam vibe. The longer wheelbase is mitigated by the massive flares, and the non-integrated bumpers in contrasting black look inspired by something you’d find on an excellent Euro-market hotted-up Fiat or something.
That’s the vibe overall—non-specific Euro or Japanese goodness from the sportier parts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This aesthetic does a lot of Alpha’s lifting overall, but this is yet another novel expression of it. And the interior, with the prominent gauge hood and the vintage two-knob radio just below a large touchscreen, manages to work without jarring anachronism.
The Saga is funky. Alpha, give us a ring when it’s real.
