features, price and technical sheet

“We had to make a car under 20,000 euros in less than two years. We went into command mode”

With these words Paula Fabregat, Director of Design Projects at Renault for segments A and B, summarizes the madness that has been the launch of the Renault Twingo. It is the last major assignment for Luca de Meo, who was CEO of Renault until last July when he unexpectedly left to make the leap into the luxury market with the Kering group. Since its arrival, the brand has experienced a true revolution, focusing on relaunches of the company’s legendary models reinterpreted as electric cars within the famous plan. Renaulution.

The underlying idea in this Twingo looks very similar to the launches we have already seen: urban car like the Renault 5 and the Renault 4created with great care to stay attached to the past and, at the same time, propose an alternative that conquers by design to convince the undecided.

The point is that the underlying idea was the same, the way of executing it has been very different.

And, despite everything, the result at first glance (before getting into the car) is up to par.

Technical data sheet of the Renault Twingo

Same spirit in modern times

We enter a ship. A pristine Renault Twingo awaits us. With all its nineties aroma. With that jovial spirit and good roller that comes from its colorful upholstery, its simple shapes and its dashboards “with three things counted”. That urban man with the soul of a minivan that seemed to shout to the world that it doesn’t matter what you throw at it, that it is there for you to do with whatever you want.

Their seats became beds.

Today that Renault Twingo has to play something else. It’s still that purely urban car but it has to be content, no matter what, with being purely urban.

Because the Renault Twingo is now an electric car with a 27.8 kWh battery capacity. It is a matter of pure regulations. Europe has decided that we must jump to the electric car. Segment A cars with combustion engines, crowded as they have to be with driving aid systems, They are very complicated to amortize. And they make things more difficult for the rest of the company in terms of their emissions average. Partially electrifying them is not a good idea either, with complex systems that make the product more expensive.

Renault decided that if the future was electric it had two paths. The first was to fight for pure price, to make the cheapest car possible. It is ruled out with a Dacia that has the Spring and Chinese brands entering with force. The second way was to target nostalgia, to those who really have money to remember their past times in the Renault 5, 4 and now Twingo. But if they wanted to differentiate themselves, they had to create a product that someone would truly want to buy. And to make it attractive, the French company has given all the love and care possible to these cars… trying to contain the price.

This is how the Renault Twingo was born, which in the absence of definitive prices will have an option based on less than 20,000 euros before aid. The proposal is simple: collect that spirit of modularity and practicality to have an urban car with minivan aspirations. The problem, and not a minor one, is that now the Twingo is tied to the city with that battery that approves 260 kilometers according to the WLTP cycle, which will surely go above this figure in the city but that outside of it limits us to routes that will be between 150 and, at most, 200 kilometers.

To find the key, Renault has not hesitated to go to the place where cheap, electric cars and those designed in record time triumph. The Renault Twingo is the first major product born from the design and research center that the company has opened in Shanghai. Designed in China, made in Europe. Because the car will be manufactured on Slovenian soil. Specifically in the Novo Mesto plant but with a network of Chinese suppliers around it that guarantee to contain costs. The batteries, in fact, are LFP signed by CATL. Thus, they lack tariffs but claim to be able to bring Chinese knowledge to Europe.

And since that context is not the same as that of 1992, when the Twingo was launched on the streets for the first time. To make a car like this attractive, Renault once again puts all the meat on the grill. It has done so by readapting the Renault Captur platform, miniaturizing it and installing the front axle of the Renault 5. This should give the Renault Twingo greater packaging, a greater sensation of a large car.

On the outside, the design exercise is extraordinary. Perfect I would say.

The play with the headlights, which are lightened by showing sheet metal between the LED arch for daytime lighting and the strip with three quadrangular spaces for nighttime lighting or turn signals, is exquisite. Much more so if we take into account that, in order to save costs, they are placed in the rear area. In front they frame a sort of smile with a black strip that reduces the visual weight of the set and behind they play with an appendage that resembles the ears of a headband with Korean or Japanese reminiscences.

“It is design at the service of functionality,” Fabregat reaffirms. That rear part, the design team tells us, was difficult to finish. The headlights are not attached to the body in the upper part, which generates volume but makes aerodynamics difficult. “We had a problem because we were losing a lot of efficiency. We started playing with pieces of cardboard in the wind tunnel until we found that this triangular solution solved the problem,” emphasizes the Renault designer. Again, a fun and daring solution but with the always present idea of ​​providing a solution to a real problem.

Inside, those solutions are less flashy but just as imaginative. The original model carried the colors from the exterior to the interior. Here, an attempt has been made to calm the interior but, for example, a piece on the door that maintains the color of the exterior is maintained. It is stripped of plastics and simply left visible is part of the body that is painted from the start. Not a euro is spent to include the piece and at the same time it refers to the original design and its aesthetics are maintained.

The spirit of modularity is maintained with its sliding benches. Located at the front end, the Renault Twingo grows to 360 liters measured up to the roof. A good part of them stored in the double bottom of the trunk.

Sitting down, the interior space for the rear passengers is really surprising. In fact, in this first contact you are rear seats I found them more spacious than in Fiveone of his moles. Of course, the sacrifice is made at the front where I have the impression that the driver may feel a certain amount of stress, placing himself too close to a very vertical glass to gain interior space.

The rest of the elements comply and are hard plastics but the play of colors and shapes reduces the feeling of “cheap”. If care is put into the design, those same plastics can go from clearly insufficient to passable. Here they reach this second category.

Most likely because the car is well accompanied with a seven-inch screen for the instrument panel and a 10.1-inch screen for the center. They move with Open R Link, the Renault system based on Android Automotive which we have already seen on other occasions but which has been given a facelift to offer specific interfaces for the model. The company has invented an entire alphabet to generate a new logo, like the one we can read on the tailgate. Alphabet that can also be deciphered on the roof of the car, engraved on the coating.

And sometimes, everything is a matter of details and care.

And the Renault Twingo comes with more than enough of all this.

Photos | Xataka

In Xataka | I went out for a weekend with the Renault 5. This is all that awaits anyone who buys a cheap electric car