For a town in Southern Indiana, Bloomington has its fair share of unusual cars; in the past month, I’ve seen a ’53 Hudson Hornet in front of Target, a ’47 Plymouth P15 in front of the library, a ’65 GTO convertible at the prominent brunch spot in town, an ’83 Trans Am Daytona 500 Pace Car at the post office, and more (and don’t worry, I’ve snapped photos of all and will write them up if I haven’t already). But what local Cohort member Horsepj found in front of our rather sad shopping mall was not only rather cheerful but comparatively unexpected: a 1982 Renault LeCar (I’d be interested in how he pinpointed the model year), in five-door form no less.
Its owner has mounted a Thai license plate in front, but has thankfully kept the car in original condition. The ideal use for this sort of classic, provided road salt is avoided, is to run local errands. This brown hatch, complete with what appears to be its original factory exhaust, is well suited to the task, with a supple, long-travel suspension to deal with the roads in the area, ruined by this winter’s combination of very cold temperatures and torrential rains. While it’s been a tolerable June weather wise (watch it all go to hell now that I’ve said so), the full-length canvas roof also makes this a great summer runabout in any temperature. Those who lived with these cars in federalized form may not have the most ideal memories, which makes it an especially nice find in our small town. I encountered these cars in a very different context, however, and it’s long been on my list of favorites. So needless to say, if I should see this car and its owner somewhere downtown, I’ll be sure to chat them up.
Related reading: 1979 Renault 5GTL – Style Pioneer
A curious thing unique (?) to the LeCar was that it had a different wheelbase on each side! The difference was marginal, but real.
This came inherited from the Renault 4
The R16 had the same setup, too.
I wonder what the parts situation for this thing is.
I mean, you just don’t go to, say, NAPA or Pep Boys and tell them “I need a water pump for my Renault Le Car.”
Bon Scott of AC/DC died in one of these back in 1980.
Jury is out on whether it was a two or four door.
One last rock’nroll mystery still to be solved.
This sounds like an idea for a CC article: musician death cars. I nominate the Oldsmobile Bobby Fuller was found in.
Hanoi Rocks Razzle in a Pantera was very sad as was Eddie Cochran in a Ford Consul
Hank Williams expired in the back seat of his Cadillac.
Kind of eerie that this comes up today, because today is the anniversary of Clifford Brown’s death in 1956. Brown, pianist Richie Powell and Powell’s wife (the driver) perished in Brown’s ’55 Buick in a late-night crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Wow, that makes the situation so much sadder. What an awful place to die.
East Dulwich is an awful place to die?
And poor old Marc Bolan doing himself in; in a Mini that the driver wrapped around a tree in Richmond, south west London.
Forgot about Marc,I had a massive crush on him until I saw Hanoi rocks frontman Mike Monroe
Harry Chapin died in a Beetle.
It was a Rabbit.
I was 50% right. It stalled on the Long Island Expressway if I remember the history book correctly.
Let’s not forget Jane Mansfield. Only celebrity that has a trailer part named after them.
A coworker owned a LeCar back in the day. He delighted in taking curves at a tire-squealing pace. Given that the car rode like a top-heavy tramp steamer in a hurricane, it made for a white knuckle ride at anything over about 30 mph.
He drove it blindfolded ? I had a 1982 Renault 5 with a 845 cc engine, no sweat driving it more than twice that speed. Didn’t feel unsafe at all, or maybe it was just because I was 22 back then….
French cars with their supple long-travel suspensions attract stereotypical comments in the US. Americans just weren’t used to their body motions. But if one actually had direct experience with them, or even read the reviews of them, one would know there was nothing white-knuckled about their handling. These cars handled quite well, even if there was a fair amount of body lean. And they were much more comfortable than any other small car on the road. And they were praised for that, by those that were objective about it.
Grew up with a couple of Citroens in my family and very fondly remember how smoothly they rode. Oh to have my dad’s ’63 DS19 Cabriolet back…
+1!
They were amazing when the road conditions got iffy with snow, slush, or rain. FWD with narrow tires allowed the car to cut through the stuff like a pizza slicer and kept the car on track. I remember having my turn at the wheel of a Citroen Visa and slush was forming on the fast lane of the Autobahn. People stayed on the slow lane and held up traffic. I tried the fast lane anyway and had no trouble accelerating. I passed plenty of contemporary Opel, VW, Fiat, Mercedes, Ford, Simca etc.
Yes they are soft in the legs could scare the onlookers with their extreme body roll. But they were tracking.
The genius was to provide springs with extreme negative travel. That means one wheel could drop into a major pothole while the car itself stayed almost even.
I couldn’t find a good video to demonstrate this but i found this rather lengthy story.
They were amazing when the road conditions got iffy with snow, slush, or rain. FWD with narrow tires allowed the car to cut through the stuff like a pizza slicer and kept the car on track.
Oh dearie. I forgot that story: I was motoring along in my LeCar, in about 4″ of snow on I-94 by Mount Clemens in the predawn gloom. The freeway is 3 lanes right there, with a deep gully on one side and a concrete wall on the other. Other cars had left ruts in the snow, so the LeCar was a bit squirrely as the 145SR13 Michelins were being shoved around by the ruts. The LeCar suddenly snapped hard to the right….I missed both the gully and the wall, and wound up pointing in the right direction, but by the time I had gathered it up, the people following me had seen both sides of my car.
Having grown up in (and subsequently owned) a number of Peugeots, Renaults, and Citroens, I’ll second Niedermeyer’s comment. For a great many French vehicles, the rule of thumb is lots of lean, tons of stiction – it’s just damned near impossible to properly relate how a 2CV, R4, or 504 will simply remain glued to the road in a curve when pushed hard unless you’re in it, or driving it.
As an aside to white-knuckle handling: I have a recollection from the early ’90s of Citroen revising the amount of body roll allowed in the Xantia Activa from less to more. Early cars had the computers controlling the amount of roll permitted by the hydropneumatic suspension set so low that it was nearly impossible to tell when the breakaway point was about to be reached under hard cornering, and a number of them ended up in hedges as a result. Later revisions permitted slightly more (1.5 to 2 additional degrees, IIRC) for better driver feel in curves.
Something tells me that Car Magazine had an illustration that showed this quite well. If I can find the article, I’ll scan the photo.
it’s just damned near impossible to properly relate how a 2CV, R4, or 504 will simply remain glued to the road in a curve when pushed hard unless you’re in it, or driving it.
As one writer in an R&T multi car test summed up “the LeCar corners better on it’s door handles than the other cars do upright”
Interesting string of comments… I think my friend had probably figured out where the limits were, and he relished taking folks “for a ride” exactly because of the reaction I had. He eventually replaced it with a Nissan Pathfinder.
I remember Popular Science reviews always noting extreme body roll along with good roadholding from French cars. Wish I could’ve found out for myself, but my sole Gallic car experience was a DS driven a short way at low speed. I hear they’re that way because of France’s rough secondary roads. Is that true, or is it simply a cultural preference?
BTW, I’d have been embarrassed driving a car with that phrase emblazoned on it, even if it was proper grammar. Mangled French may be OK for Warner Bros. cartoon gags, but not on something we use daily, in public.
You dont try keeping pace with Citroens like mine on twisting roads in things like BMWs they simply dont have the roadholding ability of the French cars, they might look good to magazine scribes on nice flat surfaces but on real roads with bumps potholes frost heaves etc dont even bother.
Yes, it was true at that time that secondary French roads were patch work with dips and bumps and curvy, often running alongside a small river. That made for memorable country rides. If you like to get an impression catch a few stages of the Tour de France in the next few weeks. You will find that to a large part it is still true.
Or watch this:
The above also applies to Irish roads, but that stage of the Tour de France is on what would have passed for an Irish National Route (think Autoroute) in the 1980s and 1990s. There are still some major roads like that remaining, but the roads are improving.
Still, years before driving on the Continent, those narrow, uneven, potholed roads left an indelible impression on me of how well French cars handled those kinds of surfaces.
I had two of these in Canada: a 1976 and a 1984 model. The ’76 would do 100 MPH because, being a Canadian model, it had the European R1224 engine without the US emission controls. The ’84 was a non-desmogged 1397 cc version and it would do an easy 90-95 MPH. These cars loved to drive fast – I did 4 wheel drifts in my ’84 at 60+ MPH. The suspension was amazing.
However the cars were cheaply made and were definitely not built to last in the Canadian climate, so virtually all of them have turned into iron oxide by now.
And now this is the 3rd car that either is, or was, my car on this site. We got this one as we were going to race it in 24 Hours of LeMons, but after digging into it, decided that we would prefer to go at a real speed on track, and not flip over. Iirc a mechanic bought it, and swore he was going to drive it. In the last 3 years since we sold it, it has been seen all around town. It ran when we got rid of it, but the fuel lines were clogged full of crap. Glad he still drives it.
If memory serves, they used to have a stock Renault class (at least at Road Atlanta) back in the early ’80s. A roll cage and exhaust cutout were the only mods allowed. Fun.
Yeah, they did. A friend who had spent a lot of time at Lime Rock used to refer to it as flip cup, as they were not super known for their ability to stay upright
Le Car Cup kits were actually more involved than that. They changed out all four control arms, torsion bars and damper units, cam shafts, valves and springs, rods, exhausts from the manifold back, steering racks, steering wheels from sponsor Momo, and a bunch of safety gear.
I don’t understand the comment about this car having its original exhaust. Even Renaults didn’t have sidepipes in the early ’80s.
This one is not stock, but early/some 5s did have side exhausts:
By 1976, when the R5 came to the US, the side exhausts were gone.
I’m used to seeing the one with side exhausts. I’ve seen very few on them in the states and, with the matte black exhaust paint, I had to assume it was stock. Silly me 🙂 .
While the exhaust didn’t exit out the side, they did run just inside the driver’s side rocker panel. The head pipe actually went through the left inner fender.
That side pipe came straight from the Renault 4. It had the diameter of a drinking straw.
The early L versions (which were a Renault 4 basically) had this exhaust, similar to the R4 and early R5 L and TL versions used the shiftgear springing out of the dashboard from the R4.
When Renault once realized they’d invented the first ‘super Mini’ all disappeared and was replaced by ‘normal stuff
I think it was nicknamed Le Flip Cup or something like that.
I remember the nickname “Le Coffin”.
I remember riding in one in high school and thought it was pretty cool. Kind of like a go-cart.
In addition to the 964 and 2002tii, right?
A coworker had one back in ’82. Needed a trans rebuild at something less than 30000 miles. I don’t know if she was hard on it but she wasn’t an auto enthusiast if you know what i mean.
A friend commented on FB that this car is an ’82 with a 4 speed manual. He also mentioned something about the wiring being a real mess. It hasn’t moved from that parking spot in the past couple of weeks.
Considering the abysmal quality reputation these have, it’s amazing to see one still in operation and driven regularly. The LeCar (Renault 5) routinely shows up on The Worst Cars of All Time lists. I would venture to guess that every trip is an adventure, particularly as to whether you’d be returning home in a timely manner or not.
OTOH, it would be a great conversation starter.
Many European imports have survival rates because of how awful they were rather than in spite of it. That’s because many of them exhausted their first owners’ capacity for repairing them before they were paid off. As a result, many of them were pushed into garages when they had low mileage but a major mechanical failure rather than being worn out through reliable service. Owners didn’t want to dump them and take the loss but didn’t have the stomach to keep trying to fix them. Thirty years or more later, these same failures in automotive technology are curiosities and someone takes the time to swap the transmission, rebuild the engine, or replace all the burned wiring. Good cars are seen all over the place until they’re about 20 years old. Then they tend to disappear because they’ve all been used up. Bad cars disappear after 5-8 years on the road, only to have a few resurface decades later in the hands of people that didn’t have any connection to the people whose lives they ruined when new.
“Bad cars disappear after 5-8 years on the road, only to have a few resurface decades later in the hands of people that didn’t have any connection to the people whose lives they ruined when new.”
Very amusingly put.
So when will we start seeing Eagle Premieres and Sterling 827s again?
Or even better, Medallions?
I can kind of agree with this theory, every once in a while a really clean 1980-81 Rover 3500 will appear on ebay, they are always yellow too.
That’s a very sound theory and is borne out by none other than the ‘legendary’ Hemi cars, particularly the ultra-rare Hemi-Cuda. Not only were those cars beasts to actually drive, they had a real bad habit of blowing their engines in short order. It wasn’t entirely the fault of the company engineers, either, but owners who couldn’t be bothered with the frequency of the maintenance schedule for labor intensive projects like constantly adjusting the valve lash.
The bottom-feeder imports, while priced at the opposite end of the spectrum, were no less prone to similar major component failures and, as stated, can easily be seen being put into long-term storage for the exact same reasons.
I developed this theory via seeing it play out with neighbors I knew well throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s. The cars that went into suspended animation in this way were by no means always cheap cars. They were usually brands that are gone from our market though, or one that has just returned after decades of absence. Many of the cars I know of were parked because of complications from their emissions gear or because they were badly engineered diesels from the diesel boom of the late ’70s. Pretty much every company offering a diesel but Mercedes put a shiny dead car in someone I knew’s garage. Turbos often brought about the same scenario.
An interesting theory,my brother reckons this is why there are so many surviving Scott motorcycles as nobody kept one running long enough to wear it out
I tend to disagree about your reliability perception. I have owned a pretty good variety of cars (1992 Mercury Grand Marquis, a couple of Jeep XJ 1999 Cherokees, a 1999 Escort ZX2, 2004 Renault Sport Clio, 2004 Opel Corsa , 1999 Chrysler Sebring Coupe and finally a 1984 Renault 5) This car gave me 4 years of constant service in Mexico City, a monthly visit to Guadalajara which is roughly 350 miles trip of high altitude pothole torture test among other road trips. The only thing i had trouble was the starter motor which is too close to the exhaust and had to replace 3 times (push start your car and get home). Other than that this car went buzzing all over Mexico, at a minimum expense since i am a sometimes broke young mechanics student . I had a side collision accident that almost ended my life and killed my beloved LeCar.
They are extremely simple to work on, a joy to drive, really easy on gas and just a constant conversation topic every time you drove it. I understand that Renault in USA are not something that workers in Kenosha were familiar, maybe causing the disastrous quality issues you mention. I think all the badly engineered americanizanization of the Renault 9 aka Alliance was of one of the biggest problems, because the ones built elsewhere suffer none of those maladies ( the 5,12 and the 18 were simple, rugged cars that can handle abuse with the french je ne sais quoi).
I will always miss this car, it was ahead of its time, had enough practicality, quirkiness and charisma. Otherwise, how do you explain so much attention from CC readers?
I remember these being heavily advertised at the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the flesh.
LeCars in general were rare when new, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a five-door version outside of the AMC-Renault dealer lot. Too bad the reliability was so terrible, as these were interesting in plenty of ways. Renault’s somewhat casual approach to parts and service didn’t help, either.
In retrospect, the early and mid-1980s were the last gasp of low-cost French and Italian cars in the American market. The quirky Fiat Strada died in this era, too. They simply didn’t stand a chance against the constantly improving Japanese small cars, or even the Ford Escort.
Ohhhh, I guess it is tan quality disaster day here at CC. 🙂
I was always intrigued by the three lug wheels. A broken stud would be bad on one of these. I too am amazed that one of these is still on the ground and (more or less) operational. Fantastic find!
I’ll bet the 54 Hudson is light green? When visiting Bloomington with my daughter last spring, a 54 Hudson snuck up behind me on 3rd street, heading west. I was on foot and he was out of range before I could get my infernal droidcam spooled up. The sound of that big Hudson six was musical. Can’t wait.
The Smart fortwo has 3-lug wheels, which I found to be intriguing. At one point my uncle (who owns a Smart as a runabout/advertising car for his contracting business) brought it over to our place, and I realized we had all the lug numbers in one place:
3-lug: Smart car
4-lug: my sister’s Focus
5-lug: my Mazda Tribute
6-lug: our “nice pickup,” the ’06 F-150
7-lug: our old “nice pickup,” the ’98 F-250 light-duty
8-lug: our “work pickup,” the ’08 F-350
There used to be a green ’54 Hudson that parked in the TIS lot on a regular basis. The owner was an employee. I might have a pic somewhere…
I owned one of these. A ’78 BRIGHT ORANGE that I bought new. It was a good, honest, and comfortable car for the day. Drove it from the Oregon coast, where I was living, to Iowa on three occasions. It’s a bit buzzy for a interstate cruiser. No make that a LOT buzzy. It was solid until about 60k. Then it seemed it was in the local Renault Dealers shop every month. Even with the dealer, parts were difficult to get. Traded it in on an ’80 Citation in ’82. Looking back, maybe not such a good move. We called it the Shitation.
Same here. The color was called “Chipper Orange” as I recall. I loved that it was so bright and cheery to go along with being so comfortable for such a small car. I found it easy to drive cross-country. Then again, I was young and stupid. Now I’m old and stupid- I own a Mercedes wagon and work on old Citroens.
I would not mind another R5. That color would be a definite plus.
one thing I have noticed while old car spotting in France and elsewhere in mainland europe is that you see way more surviving Renault 4s than 5s……on another note a very wise man, who was himself an american and a Citroen enthusiast, (let that sink in for a moment) once said “it is a pretty bad idea to own a french car unless you are actually in France.
Frogmobile! I had an 80. The exhaust ran under the left side rocker panel, but went over the rear suspension and out the back. The pipe had a wierd fork in it under the passenger compartment, and the fork made a 180 degree curve, with the end plugged. I looked at that pipe a lot as the exhause system rusted even faster than the rest of the car, so replacement was an annual thing. Other gremlins were also an annual thing: master cylinder, brake proportioning valve, alternator, radiator. but not outragous compared to the Detroit iron I drove in the 70s. Biggest dissapointment was how fast it rusted here in Michigan.
The sunroof was vinyl, not canvas, and a favorite feature. It worked better than A/C as I could come out of the office, reach inside to release the clamp on the front bow, fold it back and all the hot air in the car would instantly fly out.
Great car to putter around town. The torque peak was at 2500rpm, 35mph in 3rd and 45mph in 4th. The manual choke made the engine far better behaved than the stumbling automatic choke Detroit iron I had suffered with. The combination of long wheel travel, soft torsion bars and very efficient shocks made for a very smooth, well controlled ride on bad pavement. Never had the chattering and dancing on washboard surfaces that I got with Detroit iron. The brake proportioning valve, proved it’s worth. The valve was connected to the rear suspension so it would reduce pressure to the rear brakes when the car was lightly loaded to prevent rear lockup. The LeCar always stopped dead straight, while my Detroit iron would lock the rears and get sideways in an instant.
On the freeway, not so much. Depended on which way the wind blew. With a tailwind, it would hit 80. With a headwind, it would top out at 55, with the gas pedal floored.
Bottom line, a lot of very clever and effective design, brought down by lack of durability.
“2stroketurbo” posted a video of a late 70s LeCar he had been working on. My 80 differes from the 77ish version he worked on by having a different, more conventional, dash, adjustable headrests, square headlights and a 1.4L engine.
I like his takeaway at the end of the drive.
The video was neat to see, though I’m pretty sure his speedometer was a tad optimistic, he went from going an indicated 55mph to making a U-turn in like 2 seconds, I don’t think so. I’d take one of these if it was given to me.
Yeah Carmine youve probably never driven a car that steers properly, I can pull on full lock at 55kmh in my Xsara and it just turns no muss no fuss, U turns at town traffic speed are no problem whatsoever, he did say it had a full French instrument panel in town 55kmh was what he was doing.
Well first, the car is US SPEC, so its 55mph, not 55 sheep per hour or whatever you use over there, the car was sold new in the US, still is IN THE US, so why would it be kph?
I don’t know much about handling, all American cars have wooden wheels and run on coal……when they are not being pulled by horses of course….don’t you know that?
In one of the other videos you see that it has a MPH speedometer, with the red 55 and 80mph top speed.
I’m pretty sure his speedometer was a tad optimistic
Yup. Doesn’t look like 55 judging by things going past the car’s windows. Maybe more like 35-40. ‘course, the speedo could have been switched for a metric one, he did say that none of the insturments worked when he started on it, so 55kph would be more like 34mph. My 80 had a Veglia speedo. Don’t know how reliable/accurate Veglia products are. I had enough grief with Ducellier and Marchal.
It cracks me up how 2stroketurbo talks about how “capable” and lively the R5 is, but everything is relative. He’s talking about a car that pulls 0-60 in about 15 seconds. His own car is a Subaru 360.
iirc, he also lives in CC Central, Oregon.
Was he trying to sell that car? Geez, he had virtually nothing bad to say about it, even having gotten it with lots of issues. He kept saying how fast it was. My favorite comment was “feels like a big-block”. Yeah, right.
OTOH, maybe the only big-block he ever drove was an old 352 Ford…
Well, it sort of is a big block compared to Subaru 360’s and Honda 600’s he in his other videos.
I forgot that the engine doesn’t sit transverse on these, its like an old school FWD car, where the transaxle is in front of the engine and the back of the engine intrudes into the cabin a bit like a van.
Was he trying to sell that car? Geez, he had virtually nothing bad to say about it, even having gotten it with lots of issues. He kept saying how fast it was.
I gather from the video that it was a customer’s car that he resurrected after it had sat disused, outdoors, for many years.
The R5 is a very engaging car to drive. Maybe it’s just getting down the road with such a minimal car, but I think they have some real virtues, from the tractability of the engine thanks to it’s low torque peak, to the suspension refinement, to the way the hatch and rear seat work.
2stroketurbo likes really small cars, so, in that frame of reference, where a Honda AN600 pulls 0-60 in 23 seconds, a 15 second 0-60 LeCar, with a lot more bottom end torque than the Honda, is a fast, big block car.
I…I…forget…..what city was your other car from? You were very vague in the first post…..what city?
These cars do have a certain whimsy, like an organ grinder with a monkey, cute, funny, but I wouldn’t want one all the time. But overall, they were mostly shit.
Pfft
What? I said they had whimsy?
I love this LeCar! Looks similar as mine did!
The LeCar will forever be ingrained in my head by LeGeorge
http://youtu.be/sqpsreE6ewA
Cool car and the suspension reminds me of the first generation Yaris. Several owners claim the Yaris does a good job of handling rough roads well.
Once, and only once, four buddies and I climbed into one of these, each with a set of golf clubs, and slowly made our way over to the municipal golf course. It was like a clown car upon exit.
A neighbor once gave me a ride in his new LeCar. I liked the seats and that sunroof plus the go-kart size. At the time I had no interest in one but ten years later I thought it would be fun to get an R5 or a Fuego turbo coupe. The only problem was that there were none to be had. They all had disappeared in a relatively short period of time. Today I am interested in the R5 Turbo II and the R8 Gordini Rallie variants.
I thought it would be fun to get an R5 or a Fuego turbo coupe.
I liked the looks of the Fuego, but not the pushrod 1.6, and especially not the turbo…more stuff to break. It was either Motor Trend or R&T that announced a long term test of a Fuego turbo when they came out. They published the into article, but I never saw any followup articles, so it must have blown up in the first few thousand miles.
The Fuego I would go for would be the last year or two. They had a revised dash, which I preferred, and retired the old pushrod in favor of a OHC 2.2. Given the tiny numbers sold here, and Renault’s abandonment of the US market 30 years ago, I would be worried that a lot of those fragile parts would be unobtanium.
This video gives a look at the interior and dash of the 85.
A 1978 ad:
Some useful info for the (1978) comparison shopper:
80 LeCar brochure scan, showing the new dash for 80, much more normal that the dash in the 77 that 2stroketurbo was driving. The 80s had the ignition switch on the right as per usual US practice. Also shows the awesome sunroof open, and, on the top left, the blue/gray polkadot upholstry like mine had, over basic looking, but very comfortable seats.
Funny thing about the sunroof. I normally can’t have a sunroof in a car because they take out too much headroom. In the LeCar, the sunroof added more than an inch of room. I did not fit in a LeCar without it.
Le Car-the ultimate anti-brougham!
Well….there was this Renault 5 Baccara in the late eighties…
The exterior, it was the Renault 5 “Supercinq~Superfive”, the second and last generation. I don’t think it was available as a Le Car Mark II in the US.
This generation didn’t make it to the US, I don’t think we got the LeCar after 1983.
Looking at it in profile, you can see how Honda borrowed some of the 5’s profile for the 1984 Civic 3 door, but with a proper transverse engine making even more use of the shape, the profile is perfect for a small car.
The LeCar was dropped when the Alliance came out.
iirc, the second generation R5 had an up to date transverse engine layout, rather than the transplanted Dauphine/R8/R10 rear engine setup, and pulled a great deal from the R9 parts bin, while still styled to attract people who had been buying the first gen R5
Right, the 2nd gen R5 had a transverse engine layout.
I drove three of those a total of 25,000 km in Europe, they had about 10% of the cheerful French character compared to the original…best forgotten IMO.
So…former Renault owners on the board, if Renault started sending them over here again, who would buy?
Me? I’m really conflicted. I enjoyed some of their product’s traits 35 years ago, but I have gotten used to riceburners that don’t break all the time. Additionally, I really hate the styling of their current models….and I’m not that much of a stickler for styling, considering I owned a LeCar, but dang. The closest one would be a Twingo, but it looks like a Fiat 500 with a busier front end.
Nope, sorry Carlos. I’ll stick to VeeDub’s old school styling.
I’d say that these are the most conventional looking Renaults right now, the Megane 5 door hatch and wagon. But you know, Renault and “old school styling” don’t go together very well. They never did.
the most conventional looking Renaults right now, the Megane 5 door hatch and wagon
Even those have a pretty extreme wedge profile, which blocks vision to the rear. Right now, most Renaults looke like Hyundais to me, and, to my eye, that is not a good thing.
Renault and “old school styling” don’t go together very well. They never did.
Some of them, at one time, I could at least stomach. The R12 wasn’t really offensive, and the 15 and 17 were OK. The R20/30 were bland, but not offensive. The R9/11 were OK. The one I really liked, besides the Fuego, was the 18, especially the wagon.
You’ll probably like this one too, the 21 Nevada (what’s in a name ?)
Hip To Be Square !
Isn’t that the Eagle Medallion wagon?
Yes:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classic-1988-renault-medallion-the-cc-heroes-these-two-guys-are-determined-to-keep-what-may-be-the-last-of-its-kind-running/
I must be getting old, Steve. The only one of the Renaults you list that I have any experience with is the 12. My cousin had a lot of trouble with hers, to the point where the RAC serviceman cheered when called to take it to the scrapyard!
Renault has had an on-again-off-again approach to the Australian market. Renault-philes love them, nobody else seems to care. When they were assembled here they were fairly common. Once they moved to full importation in the late seventies, prices roughly doubled. About the same time there was all the to-do about French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and their sales stopped stone dead. Nobody wanted ANY French products, French restaurants were bombed…..yet people still bought Peugeots! Must’ve been because they had a better reputation.
Renaults have sold here in tiny numbers since then. Without doing a Google search, I don’t know whether they still sell them at all. Maybe only in the capital cities? I haven’t seen one on the road for years.
Even their trucks are ExtraOrdinaire.
(BTW, the first generation of this truck was introduced almost 25 years ago, so it’s not some sort of futuristic concept truck)
Not as their range stands now. I’ve had a few Renaults (and Peugeots and Citroens) over the years, and the cars they’re making now just have zero appeal for me: they’re basically just a bunch of bland, homogenised Euroboxes. And given that if they made it over to the US they’d probably wind up being sold as Nissans, their appeal is lessened even further.
That said, this also applies to Peugeot and Citroen as well: most of the cars from these three manufacturers are largely-interchangeable and don’t really offer much that someone else doesn’t. Sure, there are things like the RCZ and C4 Cactus, but they are very much lone exceptions in model ranges that are largely more of the same across the board regardless of whose badge is on the nose.
Granted, this isn’t an issue unique to the French; everyone’s playing it safe right now and sticking to tested formulae for the most part. But the things I loved about the French cars that I’ve had seem to be gone, or – at best – tiny dying embers of recollection residing in cars that have forgotten what it was in their heritage that made them great.
“C4 Cactus”
Really? They’d call their car that? Don’t they know what Cactus means in colloquial English?
As a native English speaker, I’m curious as to what it means in colloquial English – and in which dialect.
I wish I hadn’t found out!
That’s an interesting question.
The closest thing to a Renault we can buy here in the US would be the the Nissan Versa.
My SIL has one and I took it for a spin. I really liked it. It handled excellently, like you would expect from a Rena…..hmmm Nissan. It was comfy but not as comfy as I recall the Renault 4.
The Versa hatchback was on my list, but they are hard to find around here.
An original LeCar would be fun, but not for a car you need to rely on. It would be a great teacher for anyone learning to turn wrenches. It would be a great conversation piece whether it runs or not.
Supposedly it won’t be long before we will be getting Renault-based sedans here in the US, as Mitsubishis of all things. The Renault Samsung SM3 is rumored to be the basis for the next Lancer, and a return of the Galant is planned using the SM5. To top it off, it’s likely they will be built in Busan.
IIRC in Australia we allegedly get a Samsung via Renault but badged as a Nissan.
Pro: I now have the money to take care of one properly; con: the generic look of their modern stuff. I saw a Megane with Chihuahua plates at one of the malls here in the ‘Burque a couple of years ago and I remember feeling distinctly under-whelmed.
I will be driving a brand new RCZ in Europe in two weeks’ time and yeah the RCZ-R is the only model in their current range I would buy instantly. It should be fun having a new one for a few weeks over there.