OPINION: Hot hatches aren’t dead, just on hiatus

While this particular 'dream' might be many moons away (if headlines about autonomous car accidents are anything to go by), it's hard not to see signs of what car manufacturers are talking about.

Where buyers used to get excited about engine sizes, top speeds, 0-60s, five-valve heads, turbos, and VVT, now the first question is often, "Can I plug my phone in?" or "Do the back seats fold flat?". The rise of hot-hatch-aping trim levels – R-Line, S-Line, N Line and their ilk – tell us something else; we're now more interested in how a car looks than how it actually goes.

The hot hatch market mirrors this. Over the past few years, we've lost legends from the Renaultsport Megane to the Ford Fiesta ST. The Mk8.5 Volkswagen Golf GTI will be the last fast front-wheel-drive Golf, and you'd expect the Ford Focus ST to follow.

Okay, so the premium end of the market still looks healthy – in 2024 you can still buy a Mercedes-AMG A45 or an Audi RS3, but are these hot hatches in the true sense?

I'm not sure. Both the Mercedes and the Audi are gut-wrenchingly quick from A to B, but they fail in two key areas for me:

1. They're not affordable.

2. They're not that easy to explore on the road.

A new RS3 will cost well over £50,000, and the A45? It costs more than £60,000. Not long ago, you could buy a new Renaultsport Clio with a revvy 2.0-litre engine and the pedigree of a one-make race series for less than £15,000.

Try to have as much fun on the road as you can in the Clio, either in the Audi or the Mercedes, and it will go one of two ways: driving licence loss or a serious accident. 

The truth is, it's not safe to explore the limits of a four-wheel drive, 400PS-plus hot hatch on high-performance rubber because their limits are just too high. Even incident-free drives are tempered with the worry that you'll get a letter through the door cataloguing criminally high speeds.

But in an old Clio? Well, you could make full use of the rev range because they weren't that quick, and some fairly basic pedalling got the back out quicker than you could say "lift-off oversteer" with no need for the emptiness of a computer-created Drift mode.

Sadly, the high price tags look here to stay in a time when even a Polo GTI (only available as an auto and far from the most exciting example of the breed) costs more than £30,000.

The future is even more bleak. EV hot hatches are now coming thick and fast, from the Abarth 500e (complete with its gearless monotone-manufactured exhaust drone) to the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, which can be tuned on the spot like a life-sized Gran Turismo car. In fairness, I applaud the 5 N for doing its own thing – it can never be a lightweight hot hatch, so why try?

But at £65,000, the Hyundai is not a car most school kids can dream of owning a few years into their first job in the same way my generation lusted after – then owned – a Peugeot 306 GTI-6 or Mk5 Golf GTI.

But there is cause for hope, and it comes from Renault, specifically Alpine and Dacia.

The soon-to-be-revealed Alpine A290 is genuinely exciting as a right-power, front-wheel-drive EV with LSD-aping torque vectoring. This car could inject an old-school feel and adjustability back into the hot hatch class. The Alpine's rally-refugee looks are exactly what I could imagine school years me drooling over. The downside is it's likely to cost well over £30,000.

This is where Dacia comes in. Not so long ago, the naysayers told us that EVs would never be affordable, but they were wrong because you can now order a Dacia Spring EV for under £15,000, that’s £1,000 less than an entry-level Hyundai i10.

If the price of conventional EVs can make such a positive swing, electric hot hatches can go the same way too. For this reason, I prefer to think the genuine hot hatch may take a brief hiatus, but like baggy jeans in the fashion world or the MX-5 did for sports cars, hot hatches can and will be fashionable again.