1985 Renault 4 GTL goes for a drive

Today you join me driving some mad French strangely gear-shifted tiny car. Yes, it's a Renault 4. Get the umbrella gear shift going, it's time for a drive. This is a 1985 Renault 4 GTL and from 1961 until 1992 this was Renault's answer to the small car, their arrival to the 2CV from Citroen and their replacement from the rear-engined 4CV. Now I'll apologise now about the road noise but this is the only patch of shade I could find and it's currently 33 degrees outside. Now development work began on the Renault 4 in 1956. It was what Renault boss Pierre Dreyfus described as his blue jeans car. It had to appeal to a lot of different markets. It was a dwindling market but there was still a need for the small-holding kind of person who ran a small farm, pootled around the countryside with a tray of eggs in the back and all that kind of thing. But more and more people were moving to the city, becoming more urban and they wanted something more sophisticated, more spacious inside that didn't need the same level of attention at every thousand miles is some of the routine maintenance on the 2CV. So they wanted something a bit more practical, a bit more modern. So this is where this design came in. At launch there were two versions, the R3 and the R4 which were taxation classes. The R3 which was a 603cc engine was far more basic, less powerful, even had a solid metal c-post here and on the most basic Renault 4 you could pay another 400 francs and have this as a glass one. So like the 2CV it was cheap. They called it the Project 350 because it was 350,000 francs at launch and it shared a lot of other 2CV traits as well. Long travel independent suspension, torsion beam front and rear in this case, separate body and frame construction. This is a semi monocoque rather than the full monocoque or full body and frame car. Like the 2CV it's front-wheel drive but now it's water-cooled rather than air-cooled. Now let's look at the engine. Now the design brief for this car was to have a 600 to 700cc engine and early cars actually used the development of the 4CV's engine. That's not what this sounds like. In fact that was quite a major development, the sealed for life system. It's got an expansion tank, it's got a radiator, it used antifreeze so you didn't have to keep topping the water up. It wasn't a system where you expected losses, it is the system we're used to now where you seal the system and just refresh it every couple of years. Now initially there were two engine sizes 603cc and 747cc but in 1968 it gained the 845cc engine from the Dauphine. Now that was standard on the Super and optional on certain other models and that plugged on as the main engine until 1978 when it was replaced by the Sierra engine. Not the Ford Sierra engine, the Renault Sierra engine which is an 1108cc four-cylinder which became the main power unit in the GTL. So this probably has one of those as it's a GTL. Meanwhile the 845cc engine continued in service until 1986 when it was replaced by a 956cc engine version of the Sierra unit. Still with me? The Sierra of course had been around since 1962 and came from the 6TL. Now no doubt you will have noticed I'm sitting on the wrong side of the car. For some reason the steering wheel isn't in the place where it should on the right. It's here on the left. The reason being that this is a French car. Not just a French car but an actual French car which recently came from the south of France where it grew up, spent its life and there's a boot full of receipts for it as well. All written in French with francs on it and everything. Now no doubt you've noticed that this is tot and tastic in here. They were called deck chairs and all sorts in the old days. These being say later 1950s seats are actually more substantial with proper backs, proper bases and not like something you'd take out and set up on the beach. Even though Renault had gone for a traditional car with a proper floor pan, a front engine water-cooled unit, lots of traditional stuff like that. They still had to go a bit all out weird and you know just Renault really. For example door handles. Let me out etc. Where's the door handle? It's here. You have to put your hand inside the door and squeeze and that lets you out. So yeah it's kind of interesting. Also the door check straps are not inside the door shut as you might expect on a car where they try and conceal the construction of the body. They're just a leather strap here bolted to the door, bolted to the back of the a-post to stop the door swinging too wide. Also because this is built down to a very tight price, sliding windows. So pull the little nubbin out, slide it back and forth and it locks on the rubber strip when it's in the right place. This is very very basic indeed. We've got a ton of headroom and a fairly decent elbow room as well considering it's such a small car. The way this car is built it's on a platform with a body attached to it. So the chassis is like chassis rails with a base and then the body is kind of attached on top of that. So the platform is nice and wide unlike a 2CV with the separate front wings and the kind of almost running board effect which makes it quite a narrow body. The Renault 4 is like a full-sized car as you would have expected by the late 50s early 60s. So elbow room is good, headroom is amazing in here. As this car is from the 1980s it's been quite heavily revised and updated since the original 1960s designs. So it's got this big plastic dashboard. Very unusual t-shelf situation here because there is a shelf but it's sloping away so you can't really get much in there. You can put a phone in there and you pop a phone in there and it probably won't fall out the door because it is separated into little segments to stop it flying around. But no way of putting a cup in there at all and there's no cup holders of course it's the 1980s. So t-shelf is actually a zero. I haven't done a zero on a t-shelf in a very long time but we have no t-shelf opportunity here whatsoever. You can't even put a glass of red wine in there. At the top we've got a couple of little blower vents which kind of let fresh air come flooding in. I say flooding just drifting in a little bit and there is a vent onto the windscreen itself. There's a large central ashtray so both front passengers can, you know, smoke in the front because it's France in the olden days. And there is the tiniest little nubbin of a cubby hole here as well just in the centre. I am aware there's a guy walking to the back of the shot and there's nothing I can do about that so he may move around. Please don't comment. Now the dashboard dial cluster is a fantastic little weirdness. This speedo, which is in kilometres because this is a French car, it goes up to 160 which is frankly very optimistic. I believe the top speed was actually around 100 kilometres per hour on this particular car. It is basically the main dial. That's kind of all you get. This car has done 43,000 kilometres which is not far at all which is why it's in such amazing condition. That's kind of it as far as dials go. There's an absolutely tiny weeny little petrol gauge in the centre and then just a cluster of little round circles with everything from indicators flashing to wrist screen heaters on. But that little selection of circles is so 1980s. I mean this is a 1960s car but they are just making it the most 1980s thing in this little section just here. Your little stalks are the spindliest little tiny things ever. You've got wipers on the right hand side pushing down to turn on. Indicators on the left and rotate for lights and a hooter of course. Let's hear the horn. It's not his car of course it is. And then this is the thing you've probably been staring at the whole time. This gear shift is here for a reason. It's not just mad Frenchness being all French at you. The point of this is that there's no floor mounted gear shift which means there's more room in the floor. It's a completely flat floor pan and this linkage goes over the top of the engine and drops down in front because the transmission is kind of mounted in front of the engine or that part of it is. It frees up a whole load of space inside the car. We'll talk through it on the move in a moment. You do have those rudimentary basic of heaters under here. You've got an on off, a rocker switch, a little thingy for hot to cold under here. The most basic one button heater ever. It's too hot to tell whether it works or not because it doesn't really blow much cold air. And there's a huge tray down here. Absolutely massive amount of space down there. It's like a secondary tea shelf but again it's at an angle. You put bottles of Orangina I guess. This car doesn't have a radio. There's a slot down here where a radio would go and a baffle where a speaker could go but there's not actually a speaker in here or a radio. Now beyond that you've got a couple of massive door bins in the front. Plenty of room for a couple of bottles of red wine or Demi's I guess and not much else. Shall we have a look in the back? Right, it's quite tight in the back but it's a very small car so to be expected. The seats are fairly comfortable and again there's a ton of headroom. Feels a little bit more closed in on your shoulders and the doors themselves still got the same crazy little door handles are so tiny to get through. It's not a lot of space at all. You do have seatbelts though in the back which is a nice thing to find but that's kind of it in terms of luxury. There is one light up there for the entire interior and you'll notice like the Suzuki Alta we drove a couple of weeks ago the wheel wells are visible but there's just rubber coating on there to stop drumming sounds and in fact the entire floor of the car it just has a big rubber sheet all across the entire thing to protect it from dirt to make it a hose clean effectively and keep the drumming noise down. That's basically it for the interior really. A quick look in the boot and then we'll take it for a drive. It's a twist to open on the back and then a bit of a cabin of a boot inside. Let's move my bag out the way. There's a rigid load space cover that moves with the back seat and folds down to give you an absolute cavern of a car inside. Part of the design brief was practicality. It can carry a lot of stuff in this thing. This car comes with so much history it's amazing. There is the original first aid emergency kit, original Renault just paperwork. This is going back to I believe it's a town called Quimper. 1985 August 14th of August 1985 this car was registered and there are so many receipts all original Renault receipts in here all from the south of France. Now pulling away in a Renault 4 the first thing you'll notice is that the gear shift is slightly strange. This umbrella gear change is a little bit unusual to say the least but you have to remember it is basically an H pattern it's just the gear stick isn't the regular shape. Just remember it's forward and left for first left and back for second then back to the middle to the right and forward for third and straight back for fourth. If you want reverse go back to the middle push it over to the right and all the way back. Now these cars are not rapid that is a fact even the most powerful one was 0-60 in quite a long time. This little Renault 4 is currently for sale at Stone Cold Classics at Rooterman Kent. Check the link in the description below see if it's still in stock or hasn't sold already because they do seem to be flying out the door at the moment and see what else they have to look at at the moment. Now originally this was actually only a three-speed gearbox and that only had synchro mesh on the top two gears until about a year later when it gained synchro on all three and in 1968 it got a four-speed gearbox like everything else in the market but it's got two different kinds of torsion beams. The rear ones run side to side and the front ones run length front to back. There are actually a series of markers and pegs underneath so a Renault mechanic can actually raise or lower the car for off-road use in relatively short amount of time. Now these were an astonishingly good seller and they were designed to take on things like the Beetle and the 2CV which are also astonishingly good sellers but they sold around 8 million of them. Incredibly the first million whee! And that first million came by 1966 so just five years. It went on to be built in 28 different countries. I won't list them all here that would make it a very long quite dull video but incredibly I didn't know this even Alfa Romeo made a load of them. Now this thing is light it only weighs 600 kilos it's got drum brakes all round though so heading into a fast corner I say fast corner it doesn't give you a massive amount of confidence that you're going to slow down in time. Tyres squeaking at 30 kilometers per hour which is about 20 miles an hour. Now I must admit I thought this car was going to be an 845cc car rather than the 1108 so I researched that and I can tell you that an 845 makes 30 horsepower and 41 foot pounds of torque or pound feet of torque and that gives it a 0-60 time of 38 seconds so I'm fairly sure that this isn't an 845cc because it does feel a fair bit brisker than that. I mean it's still about a 20 second 0-60 I would estimate. I'll try and flash up the 1108cc spec on the screen in a moment because yeah clearly this isn't the car I thought it was going to be when I was doing a bit of reading up on it. It does bounce along the road like crazy it's hilarious to be in it's remarkable how quickly you adapt to using this strange gear shift. It's actually quite a quite a nice thing to use because it's so close to the steering wheel you don't really have to take hand very far from the wheel so it's always just there ready and waiting. It's a nice short shift or fairly short shift it's quite a cool thing to use really. The controls are actually almost disappointingly normal to be honest you expect something a bit madder than this just regular little sideways toggles and standard little just stalks. It's just way too normal I'm almost I am I am almost disappointed having been in production for around 30 years that will obviously changes throughout its life the grille on the front went from chrome to painted to plastic this dashboard obviously changed over the years as did the door handles side trims all kinds of things just evolved and it's amazing the thing was still in production though by 19 well in 1982 Renault 5 wasn't far away the Metro was on the market this kind of thing was looking very dated indeed but still it was plugging on but quite surprisingly like the Mini there was enough of a following for it in certain markets that Renault decided that despite it had despite having technically been replaced by the newer model the Renault 5 they would continue to run it side by side in sort of limited numbers. I do find that quite astonishing that they did that. Now there were a few special editions and unusual versions of this car for example there was a Sympa I believe it was called which is a four-wheel drive version there was the Plin Air which was I believe aimed at a military contract where it kind of really pared down no doors no roof real lightweight a bit like the red Fiat 500 kind of naughty car I forgot the name off the top of my head it does look remarkably similar to that the military contract never happened but they did make a few of them for holiday use of course there was the panel van as well which was at the Boulangerie's favourite you see the French sticks sticking out the roof and the very last ones the last 1000 were known as the Bye Bye edition and they all had a little plaque on them to that effect in Japan in 2003 there was a bit of an unusual attempt to revamp before known as the Ansel Lapin and it was a bit like the Nissan Figaro but based on the Suzuki Lapin which the model we didn't get over here and it was a body based on that car which looked remarkably similar to the Renault 4 getting up to some kind of speed and it does feel a little bit wobbly you can feel it's quite narrow and quite tall and it's on very skinny little tyres and that torsion beam suspension is designed more for bad surfaces and unmaintained roads than going for any kind of high speed effort wow it leans I was gonna say wow it leans but it sticks but unlike say like a Rover 2000 a P6 which leans but sticks this leans and then makes horrible squeaking noises from the tyres even at about 30 kilometers per hour not a car you want to push I don't know if you saw that Cobra go past the other way then that was quite exciting I have always been a bit of a fan of these cars I've always thought they were just wonderfully French quirky but have enough sensibleness to make them quite practical and I think it's even come up as a question on the live chats would I go for a Renault 4 or a 2CV and I have to say the Renault 4 has always been my choice given that particular predicament and it's a while since I've driven one but I've forgotten just how much fun they are they are not rapid they do lean the GTL has got bigger drum brakes than standard so you can stop a little bit better than in a more cooking model but they are just huge fun and if you have got to take a load of stuff to market then you've got a great big boot perfect for it what's not to love well thanks for watching I hope you've enjoyed this little ride out in the countryside in what is really a little French icon if you've enjoyed this please hit like please and subscribe as always please share with a friend on Facebook if you've liked this and I'll see you again driving something completely different