New Renault 4_ They’ve Done It Again!_

Imagine how annoying it would be to have a sibling who was brilliant in every way, celebrated and adored everywhere they went. Imagine the pressure of having to follow that act. Well, if you can imagine it, congratulations, you now know how it feels to be my sister. On a separate note, this is the new Renault 4. So, let's start with the design because, I mean, we have to, don't we? And what's immediately clear is that this, like the R5, is a pastiche, not the Cornish kind. This car is a homage to the iconic Renault 4 and you can see that from every angle. You can see it from the general shape, but there's also lots of lovely little details, just like the R5. This piece across the front that houses the headlights, very Renault 4. Like these lovely little rear quarter windows that don't really do anything in particular, but they are very Renault 4. These streaks across the doors, which are there to kind of symbolise the crash protection on the old cars, very Renault 4. The shape of the boot lid, the shape of these three-piece brake lights, it's all there, just modernised. And I think this is an interesting choice as well. On the Renault 5, you get a little charge indicator here, but on the 4, a percussion instrument. As I stand here looking at it for the first time, I don't think it's immediately rocking my world, like the R5 did the first time I clapped eyes on it, but that is an impossibly high bar. I think it is a superb piece of design. So just how much bigger is this thing than a Renault 5? Well, 22 centimetres longer, 7 centimetres more wheelbase, 8 centimetres taller, 1 centimetre narrower, and a lot boxier. That's the key thing here. The fundamental shortcoming of the Renault 5 for me was the space in the back. It is only a small car, but even for its size, I wasn't massively impressed. If you're more than medium-sized, and if the person in front of you is more than medium-sized, it's not especially fun back there. So, has this improved on that? Let's have a look. Seat in my position. I'm very tall, as we know, and immediately, hugely improved, especially in the headroom department, thanks to that boxy shape. This isn't too bad. I tell you what, it's not blowing my mind. My knees are pretty high. The floor is pretty high. Okay, it's not full-on Hyundai Insta sofa seating back here, but it's a lot better than the Renault 5, as you'd expect. This is more impressive, because the boot in the Renault 5, decent size for a supermini, but it's got a huge lip that you've got to lift stuff over to get it in. Have a look at this for an opening. So this is a 420 litre boot. It's almost 100 bigger than the one of the Renault 5, but just look at the shape of that opening. Completely flat floor, super low lip. It's like a wardrobe. This is absolutely fantastic. In fact, it's the biggest boot of any car in its segment, with the lowest loading height in its segment. Dead handy. There is a false floor and storage space for your charge cables, but it's a faff in most cars. You've got to lift the whole boot floor. You've got to empty the boot out. Annoying. In this, there's just these little flaps, these little flaps, so you can get to your charge cables even when there's stuff in the boot. Clever. And just nice, fun touches everywhere too. Look, I like the four pattern on this piece of plastic on the side here. I like that there's the French flag on this elastic strap. They didn't have to bother with those little details, but they did. And just like the Renault 5, there's a sense that fun was had designing this thing. I like the Renault 4 too. Now, one of the key principles of the old Renault 4 was usefulness, practicality. It was only a diddy car, but every square inch was purposeful, had some sort of function. And a nice example of how they've carried that philosophy over into this new car is the roof, because there are two roofs to choose from. This one, hard roof with proper functional roof racks. Do you know how common it is for the roof racks on new cars to not be functional? Don't take any weight. They're just there for aesthetic purposes, not these puppies. Alternatively, you can have a giant retractable fabric roof. It's basically a convertible. It's absolutely fabulous. And I'm gutted that all the press cars today came with the hard top. Fun story about this car and just how versatile and useful the old one was. My grandmother used to have a Renault 4. When she got too old and frail to drive, a nice chap bought it off her. A week later, he sent her a photo of it on top of a sand dune. He did the Paris-Dakar rally in that car. Big shoes to fill. We're really excited to partner with Duracell Energy to showcase their amazing renewable energy solutions. If you want to reduce your energy bills and join the renewable energy transition, installing home battery storage and solar panels at home is a great way to start. 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Just answer the question about fully charged by following the link in the description. Good luck! Now, out on the road in the new Renault 4, what's the news? Well, the headline, it's pretty Renault 5y. That's to be expected. Same architecture, same setup with a single motor powering the front wheels, which in this bigger battery version, gives me about 150 horsepower and about an eight-second 0-60 time. On paper, dead similar. To drive, some subtle differences. I definitely think this is a more laid-back car. We've got longer suspension travel. It's got a bit more roll and squash to it. Sorry, George. It's got a bit more roll and squash to it. And I think, maybe, that the throttle mapping is a bit more laid-back as well. You have to press harder to go quickly. And that's all in the name of giving this car a more relaxed personality, which is perfectly befitting of a taller, crossover-y thing. Basically, the choice is yours. If you like to be lower to the ground and have that go-kart feel that kind of makes you feel like you're going quicker than you are, then the Renault 5 is there. Or, if you want a more relaxed driving experience and you want to sit up nice and high in your big squashy seat and lord over the road, Renault 4. A really exciting difference is I've now got, look at these, I've got two paddles behind the steering wheel to adjust the strength of my regen braking. Yes! Great to see. In the Renault 5, you just pull the stalk from D to B, and there's only one regen strength, and it's not strong enough. This, I've got proper one-pedal driving if I want it, really brings the car to a proper full stop quite briskly. But I can adjust it with the paddles, and I've found that when I've been driving downhill, I've actually been moderating my speed on these paddles, which is quite fun. And they're really nice to press. Great to see those. Now, an interesting similarity between the 4 and the 5 is the batteries offered, because you would expect that this slightly bigger car would have slightly bigger batteries. Not so. It's the exact same options. 40 kilowatt hour or 52 kilowatt hour. And you can be forgiven for worrying about the implications of that in terms of the real world range. After all, those are not especially big battery packs. But there is good news, because number one, this car weighs less than 40 kilos more than the Renault 5. That's negligible. It's like a medium-sized 11-year-old. Number two, the Renault 4, just like the Renault 5, is supremely efficient. Now, the weather today has been pretty perfect for an electric car battery, the ideal temperature. And we've not been doing especially strenuous driving. A little bit of motorway, a little bit of country road like this. Nothing too intense. Having said that, we have been effortlessly hitting about 4.7, 4.8 miles to the kilowatt hour across our driving today, which is very impressive. Renault quotes the range of this big battery version as up to 247 miles. And based on the efficiency we've been seeing today, our range would be 248. And I just love that. I love how efficient this and the 5 are. I love how honest and accurate Renault are with the range figures that they give on their website. And I think that efficiency and the relatively small-sized batteries that it enables these cars to utilize is probably central to the price points they've been able to hit with this car and the Renault 5, leaving lots of budget left over for, you know, nice seats and what have you. But what is the price? Initially, we're only getting the bigger battery version in the UK, and it'll start at just under £27,000. That means you can have a base-spec Renault 4 for the price of a mid-spec Renault 5. Tasty price point. It does seem a bit weird to me that you have to pay £31,000 for the top spec if you want heated seats. But let's remember, that's still less than the starting price of a Vauxhall Mokka E. Right then, interior of the Renault 4. And this won't take long because, well, it's the Renault 5 interior. And I was a bit disappointed about that for about half a second when I first saw this because, well, it's all new on the outside. I sort of hoped it would be new on the inside, too. But then I put my grown-up motoring journalist hat on and reminded myself that Renault is a business and would probably like to make some money off these new models. And, well, if you're going to sell EVs down at this price point, you do have to be clever, share some parts. All of this was new to the Renault 5. It can't all be new for the Renault 4 as well. Think of the Citroen EC3 and EC3 Aircross. Very similar, just one's a bit bigger and taller. That's the relationship between these two cars. I suppose we should be grateful that they went to all the effort to give it a completely new body. Anyway, I'm not grumbling because I loved the Renault 5 interior and it's all great here, too. Proper physical switches for the climate and for the hazards and for your volume up there. Google software. I think it's actually even faster in this than it is in the Renault 5 and it was great in that car. Voice command that actually worked. Really great-looking digital gauge cluster except it's all blue instead of all yellow in this car. The seats. The seats. They were a highlight in the... The seat. The seats. Sorry if you're hearing a bit of background noise. A man with a circular saw has decided now is the opportune moment to start cutting pieces of metal up. The seats, they were a real standout highlight on the Renault 5 and they are in this, too. They really hug you. Nice bit of support, nice and buckety without being too much for, you know, normal day-to-day driving. I like this print, this houndstooth. It's a funky pattern. You see it on the seats here as well. If I have a complaint, it's that it feels a bit drab colour scheme-wise compared to the zany yellow or denim interiors of the Renault 5. Maybe that's because this, as the crossover, is the more grown-up, sensible proposition for more grown-up, sensible people, which would explain why I like it less. So, the Renault 4. What do we reckon? Is it another world beater? Is it Renault 5 levels of sensational? Well, on first impression, I'm not as instantly smitten as I was with the R5. Let me explain. There's two reasons here. They're both super nit-picky. For one, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the space in the back. It's okay, but I was sort of hoping for Hyundai Insta levels of cavernousness because it's on bespoke EV architecture and it's a box on wheels. I was expecting slightly more, although I do admit the boot is magnificent. Secondly, and this is completely subjective, the more I spend time with it, I'm not sure I'm clicking with the design of this quite as much as that of the Renault 5. I think this doesn't come together quite as well. It just feels a little bit like an old car's face smooshed onto a new car, whereas the R5 just works in isolation as well as being a wonderful homage to a car from the past. It's also a little bit Fiat 500L from the back and I can't unsee that. Very interesting to know if others agree about the design of this. It's definitely 10 times more interesting to look at than 90% of the crossovers on sale today, but is it R5 special? Maybe not quite. But this is me being insanely harsh and I'm doing that because, frankly, I was almost embarrassed by how gushy I was about the new Renault 5 and slating this car for maybe not being quite as complete as that car would be like slating a film for not quite being as good as The Godfather 2 or Paddington 2. It's a ridiculous bar. The fact of the matter is this is a fantastic little electric family crossover and it's got nine tenths of what makes the R5 superb. It's got the comfort, it's got the efficiency, it's got this premium feeling, wonderfully user-friendly interior. Now just in a taller, squashier package with a bigger boot. With the addition of this car, Renault's electric vehicle lineup is formidable now. One of the best of any brand anywhere in the world and, for me, certainly the most impressive of any European brand. And I certainly want to live with this a little bit longer before drawing my final conclusions. I want to live with the styling and see what the efficiency is really like in the UK on our nasty roads and our nasty weather. But actually, regardless of what I think, I strongly suspect that this car is going to be very popular just like the R5, if not more, because it's the sort of car people like these days. So there we go, a first drive of the new Renault 4. Very interested to hear in the comments what do you make of this thing? What do you think of the design? Is it as special as the R5? Do let us know in the comments. Do make sure to like and subscribe and, if you have been, thank you for watching.