High five: slip into classic couture with the 5 E-Tech

Replaced almost three decades ago by the Clio, Renault’s reimagined hatchback supermini has been thrust back onto ine catwalk with no little success, writes Sean O’Grady

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Doing retro is a tricky business. A branch of fashion, really (which cars should be, given their expressive role in our lives), and that's, well, hit and miss. Go too kitsch and you can end up with a bit of a pastiche - like the Fiat 600, which doesn't bear much relation to anything from the past (shame on the Italians, there), or the strange Japanese Mitsuoka Viewt, a miniaturised Mark 2 Jag based on a Micro. Move away too far from your roots, like the latest heavyweight generation of "new" BMW-built Minis (actually about a quarter of a century old now), and the lineage is lost.

Happier are the Fiat 500, the much missed Fiat 124 Spider, and the latter iteration of the reborn VW "New Beetle", (though the old one never wore such a badge), which scuttled away, unnoticed, about the time when we put Clegg and Cameron into Downing Street (that pair remain firmly out of fashion).

Which brings us to the new/old Renault 5. This battery electric vehicle could easily have been a farce, because misjudgements in couture are so easy, but what the designers seem to have done is considered what the Renault 5 (born 1972), a hatchback supermini, as such cars were once known, might actually have evolved into had it not been replaced by the radically differentlooking Clio by 1996 (yes, it was that long ago, Nicole). Well, it works.