I own and drive Caterham for the most of the last twenty years and used to have Alpine A110 as well

Caterham used to be sold in kits from the Caterham factory and being build in France by the sole dealer.

You couldn t buy and build your own kit and get it road legal

Four years ago, the COC for small volume manufacturers has been implemented and facilitated massively sales of low volume cars

However, cars now have to be built in the factory and can t be exported as kits and build locally

The UK retains quite a liberal approach on small volume cars and Caterham in UK have a different set of rules, mainly on emissions and noises to the COC models that are exported

Registering a UK catheram on the continent is a lot of pain and would at minimum require that the car is factory build and compliant to all emissions and noise level, which is virtually impossible

The former Renault Dieppe factory, used to produce Alpine and then produced some Renault Espace. That plant is small and more a big workshop type than a normal assembly line. They have been focused on small series of cars lately, mainly the race cars for some race series such as Megane, with tubular farme and poleyster bodies etc...

It is intended that Renault and Caterham will join forces to develop a new chassis, that will then be sold either wrapped in a Renault body or a Caterham body, something not too disimilar to the Elise VS the Vauxhall Spedster, I assume

Wether Renault will supply Caterham with engines for the Caterham version and wether such engines will find their way in Seven is unclear at the moment

There are a number of pretty good four cylinders in the Renault range at the moment and with down sizing, they are working on a number of sporty engines such as a 1600 delivering 190 BHP and returning 45 MPG

As of the 1st of January an emission tax is hitting very hard cars that are above 200 G of COČ per kilometer, as it will be circa 4.000 GBP plus a yearly tax of 140 GBP

It is unlikely that the new Catpine will have an engine whose emissions are that high and I would bet for a small turbo or twin turbo Renault block producing 180 BHP in standard mode and up to 280 in the most powerful version