Forgive me, because this isn’t just a review of the new, all-electric Renault 5. It’s ended up a review of where we are with electric cars as a whole right now, and it revolves around the theme of charisma. Charisma, as we know, is something you either have or you don’t. Politicians like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had it and, despite his well-documented flaws, Boris Johnson did, too. Keir Starmer, on the other hand, as dutiful as he seems, definitely does not. When I was a teenager I was in awe of Ayrton Senna – not only because he was supremely talented but because he was a mercurial, almost mythical, man. Senna oozed charisma. The link here, by the way, is that I found myself wondering: can an electric car have charisma?
Like you, I’m a petrolhead, but I have nothing against electric cars. I get the challenges they present – living in London without off-street parking being one – but I’ve found myself surprisingly open-minded to the concept. And, having driven many EVs over the years, it’s not the propulsion system that disagrees with me but the cars themselves. Why? Because some manufacturers think they need to reinvent the wheel when they produce an EV: it’s an electric car, therefore it must be radical.
This can manifest in several ways and very often goes wrong. Physical controls can disappear, because they’re deemed old hat, so the car’s impossible to operate without veering off the road. There are numerous driver ‘aids’, of course, which are meant to stop you from veering off the road, but they can make life hell by interfering all the time. And you can’t always turn those off easily without the key to The Chamber of Secrets – or the modern infotainment system, as it’s often called. This is more complicated than a supercomputer because it’s rammed full of gimmicks that no one ever asked for. But, because most car companies can’t do software, it’ll crash every five minutes. Worst of all is when a manufacturer forgets the most important bit: the metal box on wheels that encases all this new-fangled stuff. Until EVs arrived, I thought truly bad cars had been consigned to the history books, but no. Some of them really do ride and handle like a piece of slop, or come with misaligned panel gaps you could slip a brick into.
Thankfully, there are also some good EVs, like the Kia EV6, and some great ones, like the Porsche Taycan. It shows us that the future can still be fun because the Taycan is phenomenally good to drive. In Turbo GT spec, with Trofeo tyres, I reckon it’s as rewarding as the very best performance cars out there. But, returning to the question of charisma: does the Taycan have that last pinch of the all-important je ne sais quoi? Is it charismatic? No, I don’t think it is. But then are many new cars, even good ol’ petrol ones? Could it be that we’ve simply slipped into an era when all cars are a bit too homogenised and soulless?
Of course, you can try to inject some vim and going retro is the default path. When I heard the news that Renault was relaunching the Renault 5, I thought, ‘Here we go - yet another attempt at leveraging the past to sell a boring car to twits who’ll fall for any old dross.’ But then I saw pictures of the new Renault 5 and it wasn’t like the new Ford Capri at all. It looked fantastic. It looked exactly how I would imagine a modern Renault 5 should look. From that moment until its launch, my desire to drive one has only grown stronger. I’d never been more excited to drive an electric car and, I’m not being disingenuous here, no other car this year has given me such a fizz of anticipation. Is that charisma? I’m not sure, but when El Cackandant asked me to go ‘drive the Five’ I was ecstatic.
It’s not only me who’s been beguiled by it. The new R5 seems to have charmed the pants off everyone in a manner I haven’t known a car to do for a while. Take my mate, Andy, for instance. Andy’s bold and brash; he drives a Defender with silly light bars and even sillier wheels, but he liked the idea of the R5 when we discussed it. So, too, did my old school friend, Jonathan. Jonathan and I agree on many things, but he drives a Model 3 and finds it hard to countenance anyone other than Elon Musk can build a good electric car. We don’t agree on that, yet he conceded that the R5 was, at the very least, great value when I told him the price.
How much are we talking? £22,995 bags you the entry-level Evolution trim with a 40kWh battery and 120hp motor. If you want the bigger 52kWh battery and 150hp motor, you have to move to the mid-range Techno trim. Even that costs a relatively reasonable £26,995, mind. That’s the car I was given, albeit a French-spec car in left-hand drive. The official 248-mile range isn’t anything to write home about, nor is the 100kW peak charging speed, but, for a car at this end of the market, designed predominantly for use in the city, both seem perfectly acceptable to me. The 3.3mi/kWh bodes well, too, considering I wasn’t driving it with any thought of range anxiety.
When I saw the R5 in the flesh it looked even better than in the pictures, which was a relief. Sure, it’s bigger than the original – 271mm longer than a second-generation five-door to be precise – but compared with most modern cars it manages to look compact. And awfully butch, thanks to those superbly sculpted arches, but not angry. I think this R5 will appeal to everyone: men and women; young and old. It’s so unmistakably a Renault 5 that if you remember the earlier cars fondly, this one’s bound to pluck a heartstring or two. Especially with the lovely echoes from the past: the square-ish headlights; the tall, thin rear clusters; the reimagined bonnet air intake, which is now a useful charge-level indicator. Meanwhile, if you don’t remember, or don’t care, about the R5s of old, this is simply a standout piece of design – a car I think slots neatly into the hinterland between handsome and pretty.
There are some other bits of the design that I’m less enamoured about. The pointy-out sills, for example. Sure, they give the sculpted sides a 3D quality, but they really are very pointy. To the point that I smacked my shin against one the first time I clambered in and it properly hurt. And later, when they were covered in mud after my drive, I found it very difficult to avoid cleaning the mud off with my trousers as I got out. The sills aren’t the only potential weapon, either. Open the front door and it exposes the corner of the dashboard, which is also pointy. If, like me, you have lanky legs, your knee will be aiming right at this point when you get in. I saw the jeopardy and avoided contact, but it would take only a momentary lapse of concentration to discover your kneecap rattling around on the floor and the definition of excruciating pain.
Almost immediately, then, I found some flaws, but none of them put me off. Not least because there’s so much else to enjoy about the interior. For starters, considering this is a supermini EV that’s been built to a price, it looks and feels great. There are more blasts from the past inside, like the square-edge bolstered seats that hark back to the R5 Turbo, and the lines of stitching on the passenger-side dash mimicking the moulded plastic dash of the original model. It doesn’t feel overwrought and clichéd, though. It’s classy. There are plenty of hard plastics but you don’t focus on those. Partly that’s because they’ve been toned down with a dull sheen that softens their visual impact, and they’re interspersed cleverly with plusher materials for the key touch points. It makes the interior quality feel more than the sum of its parts and it seems solidly put together, too.
Those shapely front seats are comfortable and the driving position is, in the main, the same. Okay, it’s a shame the backrest is adjusted by a lever, which doesn’t give you the fine control of a wheel adjuster, but you sit aligned nicely with the steering wheel and pedals. My 6’3” frame fitted, too. In fact, despite the relatively high seating position, I had loads of headroom and enough legroom with the driver’s seat fully back. I needed the adjustable column extended all the way out for the steering wheel to just about reach where I wanted it, and I was left with a clear view of the instruments.
However, the rear seats are pokey. Headroom’s okay but legroom, for me at least, was not. With the front seat set for my driving position, there’s more chance of me gaining Mensa membership than gaining access to the R5’s rear seat. The only way I’d fit is behind someone much shorter and a good Samaritan – as in, gracious enough to trade some of their legroom to help me out. There’s a reason why the back seats are tight, though: Renault’s made sure the boot is decent. At 326 litres it feels suitably roomy for a supermini, and they even thought to add some handy under-floor storage for the charging cables.
For all its focus on style, back seats aside, Renault hasn’t forgotten functionality, then. There’s more evidence of this with the row of physical buttons along the centre console for the main climate controls. You also get Renault’s now-signature trick of a single button that disables the worst of the mandated driver assist functions swiftly. Even the infotainment system is a joy to use. The crystal-clear screen is mounted high, angled towards the driver, always responsive and dead easy to navigate. And the R5 still has the old-school, French-style audio controller stalk nestled behind the steering wheel. So once you’ve learned the buttons by feel, you can control the stereo without taking your eyes off the road. Genius.
Once on the road, the visibility is really good. Obviously, the R5 had to pass the latest and toughest NCAP tests (it got four stars, by the way), so the pillars aren’t exactly stick thin but, for a modern model, they don’t feel overly restrictive. This has the added bonus of making the car feel light and airy inside, and the control weights add a lightness to its dynamics, too. Well, that’s mainly down to the steering, which is very light. That’s fine when you’re pootling around town but too light for my liking at speed. I ended up settling on the heftiest of its three modes (you can mix and match settings in the ‘Perso’ drive mode), but even then it’s a mixed bag. The steering’s quite quick off-centre with a good amount of feel, so you pick up on changes in road-surface texture and the like, but there’s very little weight progression as you add lock.
Why’s that an issue? It makes it very difficult to read the lateral forces building up at the front to know, instinctively, when the grip’s about to disappear. I really struggled to trust the front end. I thought I had the measure of it at one stage, so I entered the next roundabout with a bit more commitment and was met with plough-on understeer. It’ll rotate if you lift off but it’s a relatively lazy action. I am not saying it’s dangerous, by the way. It isn’t. Drive the Five at seven-tenths, as most people will, and it’s perfectly dependable. Also, the roads were wet, cold and greasy, so maybe it’ll feel completely different in the dry, or on different tyres. The car I drove was fitted with Goodyear Vector 195/55 R18, which are all-season tyres. All I am saying is that, from this experience, if you were hoping the R5 would be a bit of a driver’s car, it isn’t. The Mini Cooper Electric is still the way to go on that front.
The stats say this 150hp model isn’t as quick as the Mini, either. It’ll do 0-62mph in 7.9 seconds, but that seems like a respectable turn of speed for a supermini. Remember, if you want something quicker, it’s out there in the form of the 220hp Alpine A290 that Matt drove, or coming soon as the crazy-looking, 500hp Renault 5 Turbo 3E that’s been signed off. In reality, the R5 feels peppy from behind the wheel. There’s a healthy, consistent, surge of acceleration from the get-go, which tails off only once you’re past sixty. The trouble is torque, and it’s not that there’s too little. There’s too much for the front axle to handle. Again, this was a wet day and I was driving spiritedly at times, but out of slow- to medium-speed corners I was struggling for traction – and I wasn’t always driving like a moron, honest. I’ll wager even your granny would find exiting a junction in the wet frustrating; go for a gap and the traction control is almost guaranteed to limit power and leave you floundering.
In other respects, the R5’s a wonderfully easy car to get along with. The body control is impressive. Now, it’s not entirely impervious to the effects of a right humdinger of a humped-back British B road. There’s the occasional, elongated suspension stretch after a particularly high peak, or an extra bounce after an equally deep compression. For everything in between, though, the R5 feels tied down agreeably. This is no fancy-pants hot hatch, remember; the components used here will be at the cheaper end of what’s available and they have to deal with 1,456kg – light by EV standards, true, but not an inconsiderable mass to manage. That dictates the underlying tautness of the suspension, which leads to some secondary ride shimmy and the odd thump over potholes. On the whole, though, the R5’s ride is pretty comfortable.
For a supermini it’s even refined. My car had a bit of gusting from the driver’s door seal, but because I couldn’t hear the same sound coming from the passenger’s side, I put that down to a car-specific issue. Actually, that reminds me: Renault, if you’re reading this, I forgot to mention that the steering wheel wasn’t on straight, either. Otherwise, wind noise at speed is consistent and reasonably muted. Road noise is much the same, and the lack of any raucous suspension twangs makes the R5 feel quite sophisticated. As do the brake-by-wire anchors. They have none of the grabbiness you get with other electric Renaults, like the Scenic or the R5’s forbear, the Zoe. Instead, the brake pedal feels firm, effective and confidence-inspiring.
Getting back to the charisma theme, I wonder whether for someone or something to have charisma, does there have to be flaws involved? All the examples I gave at the start are flawed individuals. Is that why they are so fascinating? Perhaps charisma isn’t born of perfection, it’s just the right blend of the perfect and imperfect. Who knows? The R5 has its flaws, no doubt about that, but I love it in spite of them. Yes, it could do with a bit more rear space and, for me, a better front end – hopefully the latter will be engineered into future versions. Or, maybe, I just need to drive it on a balmier day. Those deficits are outweighed by the great bits, though. This car made me smile like I can’t remember a car doing in a while, and you see other people’s faces light up when they spot it, too. It’s not difficult to spot, mind, not when it’s painted in ‘Pop Green’ (ignore the press pics) but the R5 is so charming and it has to be one of the few cars that can pull off such a lurid shade of green and still seem classy. And, yes, as far as I am concerned, the Renault 5 is wonderfully charismatic, too.
It’s not just carried by charisma, though. Renault’s got plenty right with this car. For a supermini, the handling is good enough, as is the range, and, while I am not claiming it’s cheap as chips, for a run-around EV the price is good enough. And it goes beyond ‘good enough’ in plenty of ways. For example, I think the interior is terrific, but I also enjoy the effortless way it breezes around town or saunters along motorways. What I love most is that it feels like my kind of car. Weirdly, that’s because it feels a bit old-school rather than radical. Not just in the styling, which clearly harks back to yesteryear, but because it harks back to the days when common sense prevailed and cars were designed to look good and be easy to use. All it takes, it seems, is a simple design, a smattering of buttons, an infotainment system that works, and I’m anyone’s.
Three things struck me after a few hours behind the wheel of the R5. Firstly, I hadn’t once thought about it being electric. The lack of internal combustion made absolutely no difference to my enjoyment of the car – at least not in this class. Second, I realised that I didn’t want to hand it back, which brings me to the third point. I did have to hand it back and, after doing so, while walking away I stopped, turned around, and admired the Renault 5 one last time. If that’s not a sign of charisma per se, it’s definitely the mark of a great car. Well done Renault: you’ve given me the real first glimpse of a fruitful future. It’s bright, and not just because it’s Pop Green.
Specification | Renault 5 E-Tech Techno (150hp)
Engine: 52kWh battery, single electric motor
Transmission: Single-speed automatic, front-wheel drive
Power (hp): 150
Torque (lb ft): 181
0-62mph: 7.9 seconds
Top speed: 93mph
Weight: 1,450kg
Range (WLTP): 248 miles
Efficiency (WLTP): 4.09mi/kWh
Charge rate: 100kW
CO2: 0g/km,
Price: £26,995
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