The New Renault 5 Is Brilliant Small Car First And A Compelling EV Second

I’m struggling to think of a recent car release that’s captured the imagination of enthusiasts and the public as much as the new Renault 5 E-Tech Electric has. Pretty much every time I parked up, and on one occasion on the road when I was popping out to get Fifi yet more cat food (she’s eating like she’s got kittens on board at the moment), strangers were looking and waving phones at it. It’s a good job, I love attention and never leave the house without my sunglasses on.

Not all reactions have been universally positive, mind you. My therapist, who drives an E Class convertible, wrinkled her nose when I mentioned I was getting a Renault press car. And my uncle (Skoda Yeti 4WD), who is into classic British stuff, asked me if the new 5 was “electric, or a real car.” So the new 5 – dispensing with the E-Tech suffix because, as we’ll see, it’s completely superfluous – might still have a few holdouts to win over. Including, initially, your humble author.

When the 5 first appeared as a concept in 2021, my initial reaction was it was a bit of a contrived attempt to sell reluctant consumers a small EV by trowelling on the heritage. When the production version began appearing, I hadn’t really shifted my thinking – I thought there was simply too much ‘design’ going on for such a small car. But one of the occupational hazards of using different words from everyone else is that occasionally you have to eat them. This appears to be a rare instance of me getting it wrong, and I’m big enough to admit it, so it’s a pleasure to report that those phone wavers were right. In meat space, the new 5 looks bloody brilliant.

Why The Original 5 Was So Revolutionary

The original 5 was born from Renault wanting to broaden its front wheel drive offerings in the late 1960s. Renault already had the rugged 4 and the larger family-sized 6, but Head of Planning Bernard Hanon wanted something smaller and more stylish to attract younger urban buyers. Working on his own time, designer Michel Boue began sketching over the mechanicals of the 4. When management saw what he was up to, Project 122 got the go-ahead. Renault couldn’t have known at the time that across the Alps in Italy, Fiat was working on a similar idea, but Europe was slowly realizing the packaging and economy benefits of front wheel drive. Using existing mechanicals from the 4 shortened the development time, but meant carrying over the longitudinal engine installation with the gearbox at the front of the car. This led to early 5s having a convoluted shift linkage with the gear lever sprouting horizontally from the dash. Cleverly, Renault packaged the spare wheel under the hood in the unused space. Despite this engineering oddness, when it was announced in January 1972, the chic little Renault was a sensation. Available in bright summery colors with an off-center hood intake and pioneering wrap-around polyurethane bumpers, it made the front wheel drive BLMC ADO16 look like a dated middle England crock. Although the Fiat 127 beat the 5 to market by 12 months or so, no other European maker would have anything comparable in the new supermini class for at least three years. Five million Renault 5s were sold over 12 years before the introduction of the Gandini-designed SuperCinq in 1984. Fun to drive, attractively designed, and genuinely advanced, it’s no wonder La Regie wanted to sprinkle some 5 magic on its latest small hatch.

Renault’s previous EV supermini, the Zoe, was screwed on top of the old Nissan-Renault B platform as used by, amongst others, the Nissan NV200. Ahem. The 5 uses a new dedicated EV platform called Ampr Small, which will soon be found underneath the forthcoming 4 and Twingo EVs. It’s not all brand new, though. There’s no point reinventing components customers can’t see when you’ve got a huge corporate toy box of parts you can rummage through. The front axle is from the well-regarded Clio hatch, and the independent rear suspension (as opposed to a cheap, simple twist beam) is pinched from the four-wheel drive version of the Dacia Duster.

In between those axles, you have a choice of two battery sizes. A smaller, 42 kWh three-module pack quaintly dubbed ‘urban’, and a larger four-module 52 kWh pack named ‘comfort’. Probably because the quoted WLTP 250-mile range for the bigger battery is more comfortable in day-to-day use than the 192 for the smaller one. Urban packs come with a 120 bhp motor, Comfort with 150 bhp. Both battery sizes are available across all trim levels, but the bargain basement Evolution trim is only available with the lesser one. The car our friends at Renault UK lent me was a Techo Comfort: the bigger battery and motor in its lowest available trim level, yours for £26,995 ($36,745) on the road, including taxes. This is a little above the headline £22,995 ($31301) for the boggo Evolution and specifying anything other than Kermit’s ballsack green paint is extra. Other than paint, exterior options across the range are limited to different sticker sets, some of which plaster a bloody great number 5 across the roof and are probably best avoided. On the inside, there are a few different 3D printed lids available for the center console, but the funky yellow interior seen in all the media images is only available on the top spec Iconic 5 – £28,995 ($39,468). If you want more kit, you need to step up a level – a straightforward approach we’ve seen before with Renault’s sensible brand Dacia.

 

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About The Design

Sitting squat on the road with a wheel at each corner, the 5 is unapologetically a car. It’s not a low crossover, or a crossover pretending to be a car, or any of that nonsense other OEMs say to try and convince us what we’re looking at is not actually what seeing. The 5 doesn’t have a raised ride height or a stupid sweeping roof line. It’s simply the classic 5 silhouette scaled up a bit in all three axes. At 154” (3922mm) long, 59” (1498mm) high, and 70” (1774mm) wide, this is still a small car. It’s within an inch or two of a Mini Cooper all over, which has only three doors and significantly less fresh air inside. Quoted curb weight is a little over 3200lbs (1460kgs), of which 654lbs (297kgs) is accounted for by the cell pack alone. A non-hybrid ICE Clio checks in at 2430lbs (1100kgs), so cells aside, it’s a wash. The overall height is disguised slightly by the fact that the wheels are 18,” but they roll on juicy 55-section sidewalls.

At the top of this review, I said that in terms of the exterior design, I thought there was a lot going on for a small car. On big cars, you have a lot more room to work, and things like feature lines and color breaks help a lot in disguising bulk. With small cars, you need to be careful because your canvas is not as large. Additional visual flourishes simply don’t have as much room to breathe. When it comes to the 5, I could live without the chamfered line around the wheel arch openings, but at the rear it does neatly lead into the taillights, giving a little homage to the original box arches on the first 5 Turbo. The rest of the exterior works brilliantly in hinting at the 1972 car without leaning into bad parody, and there’s something about the body colored roof that feels truer to the earlier 5.

Neat details abound inside and out. The ‘lit corners’ graphic of the DRL/indicator lights is repeated on the vents inside, leading to a consistent applied theme. The off-center 5 symbol on the hood has five segments that light up when unlocking to show the state of charge. The headlights contain a tiny Tricolore and a stylized cockerel, the national symbol of France, which is replicated in the bottom corner of the windscreen. The drive mode stalk is squared-off gloss black plastic, meant to resemble a lipstick. This isn’t a gimmick; it provides haptic separation from the other two stalks on right-hand side of steering column, ensuring you don’t stick the thing in reverse when going for the wipers.

It’s Nice Inside As Well

Overall, the interior is a genuinely nice place to be. In the front, there’s plenty of room and the seats are lovely. The fabric is made from recycled plastic bottles, but you’d never guess. The base cushion is soft and squishy, perfect for my boney tuchus, and the squared-off side bolsters hold you ever so gently like you’ve been caught en flagrante with your illicit lover. So very French. Matching fabric pads out the dashboard, with a vertical stitching pattern on the passenger side referencing the old 5. Only the front door cards have any fabric on them, the rears are all plastic. Clambering into the back, I could sit behind myself but only just. My knees were pressing into the driver’s seat back, although elbow and headroom were bountiful. I wouldn’t even attempt to contort my supermodel legs into the back of a Mini. Being a front-wheel-drive EV with all the associated mystery boxes shoved under the hood, there’s no frunk, but trunk space is a generous 11 cu ft (326 liters) with a small underfloor cubby for the charging cable.

From behind the wheel, visibility is great. Because the 5 has a normal hood shape, you can see the front corners. All this is good because, despite being achingly hot off the press, the 5 is not overburdened with intrusive and opaque ‘driving aids’ that fire incessant bongs at you as soon as you slip the car into drive. This Techno trim has the minimum legally mandated technology, and that’s it. There’s driver attention monitoring, lane keep assist, speed limit warnings, active emergency braking, and a reversing camera. No blind spot warnings, no auto parking, no lane centering, no automatic braking when reversing. No half assed self-driving. It doesn’t even have front parking sensors. All the active safety stuff must default to on when you start the car, but you can save a profile with your preferred settings and access it with one button on the right-hand side of the dash. In other words, no big deal.

There are hard controls for the HVAC and proper haptic controls on the steering wheel for playing around with display configurations, answering the phone, and setting the cruise control. The stereo controls, thankfully updated from the nineties Clio spec part still found in the Alpine A110, are on the right-hand side of the column below the wiper stalk and integrate perfectly with wireless CarPlay (or filthy Android Auto). The native Renault software features are built on full Google integration, so you have to sign your life away to take full advantage of things like smart route planning and voice-controlled search. Google also powers the Reno digital avatar, who kept popping up uninvited to introduce himself. I went full David Bowman on the annoying little squirt and just stuck to using CarPlay. Amusingly, if you have Apple Maps open on the center screen without setting a destination, it’s possible to have the driver’s display showing Google Maps at the same time. I was also unable to connect the My Renault phone app to the car, although Renault PR told me that, like a personal banking app, it could only be active on one phone at a time for security reasons. Some other media wag had probably forgotten to disconnect.

On The Road

The charm of the original 5 wasn’t just its chic appearance and pioneering format. It was also brilliant to drive. Direct unassisted steering, a great shift feel, and usual for the time loping French ride quality meant handling was a bit roly-poly pudding and pie, but they hung on gamely. We’ve all seen images of the old model on the door handles about to have an almighty tank slapper. Such bad mannered body control is a thing of the past, but the overall feeling driving the new 5 is a sense of immense chuckability. I internally raised an eyebrow when the PR person informed me the 5 would do great on bendy roads, but they weren’t wrong. It’s a total hoot. The wheel at each corner stance and diminutive size mean it willingly rotates into a tight corner like a little French go-kart. The steering doesn’t especially weight up when you’ve got a load on into a corner, but it does whisper what the road surface is like and is accurate and responsive without being too eager. It feels very much like a Mini without the extra layer of boisterousness they contain. The 5 is more grown-up and less of a hooligan than the British car, but no less fun for that.

The brakes are outstanding. It’s a complete brake-by-wire system; there’s no mechanical connection between the pedal and the pads. What this means in practice is that the extremely firm pedal modulates braking more by pressure than the amount you move your ankle. This did mean a bit of abrupt pulling up until I got used to the sharpness of their operation. There’s only one regen mode and the calibration is excellent. The blending between conventional braking and regen is completely seamless. Coming to a full stop requires a dab of the pedal, so it’s not completely one pedal driving, and to be honest, I think I prefer it this way as it feels safer and more normal.

150 bhp and 3200 lbs sounds like the wrong side of an acceptable power-to-weight ratio, but the beauty of EVs is all the torque is down at the bottom. Traction control off, the 5 is quite capable of scrabbling the front tires. 0-60 is quoted as 8.5 seconds, so away from the lights, a hot hatch from the eighties and nineties wouldn’t see which way it went. The 5 never feels like it’s running out of go at highway speeds right up to the limiter. It’s more than capable of whizzing past a dawdling semi at 60. That weight does require quite stiff springs and dampers to hold in check though, so the ride can feel a touch firm. I thought I was imagining things, but swapping back into my Mini on Tuesday, my own car felt plusher.

EV Stockholm Syndrome

The most remarkable thing about the new Renault 5 is, in a lot of ways, how unremarkable it is. With previous generations of electric vehicles, there was always a bit of Stockholm Syndrome around them – “if you pump your tires up to a hundred psi, charge every other full moon and hypermile behind 747s you can get 4 miles per kWh”. The ownership experience required accepting a ton of compromises for being at the bleeding edge – whether it was putting up with alien styling in the name of aero efficiency, control interfaces more akin to a medical appliance or simply a crappy range and charging experience. Frutiger Aero interiors built on shonky lightweight plastics and a baffling array of drive modes all aimed at extracting every last drop of efficiency from an inherently compromised vehicle. I achieved 4.3 miles per kWh without even trying. Because I didn’t need to. I saw 238 miles of range at 100% charge, and when I took it back, 56% remained for an indicated 126 miles left. Previous EV press cars I’ve borrowed, the Honda e and Mini Cooper wouldn’t even do 126 miles fully charged. When I tested the Honda e, its thoughtful tech-heavy design felt like the car from Cupertino we were never going to get. Now, two years and a failure in the market later, it’s easy to see how a limited range and high purchase price doomed it.

The 5 isn’t like that at all. It feels like a completely normal, well-designed modern car that just happens to be electric. Jump in, press the on button, tap the lipstick to select reverse, drive, or drive with regen, and that’s all there is to it. It’s so normal and fit for purpose that driving home from the Renault press office in the Mini, I momentarily forgot to use the clutch when downshifting, so quickly I had adjusted to not changing gears like some sort of prehistoric human.

If you can’t charge at home or work, you could use the 5 for running around all week without worrying about range and then just stick in on a high-speed public charger for less than an hour at the weekend. You’ll pay for that convenience – the Osprey network charger I used managed a charging rate of over 75kWh but stings you $1.13 (82p) per kW for the privilege. To fill up the 5 at that rate would cost $58.49 (£43), making it more expensive than gas. That’s an infrastructure issue though, not the fault of the 5 which, true to form, has been reinvented as an affordable slice of French style that once again happens to do something pioneering in the supermini segment. First and foremost, the 5 is desirable simply as an affordable, lovely little car. Going by the online discourse, it looks like it’s going to pull off the impressive feat of cutting right across socio-economic classes as well. The fact that underneath lies a state-of-the-art EV is completely secondary.