Renault pulls covers off bonkers 5 Turbo 3E

REVEALED Eighties’ R5 turbo is reimagined as a 533bhp, £100,000 EV that’s packing 4,800Nm of torque

- Ellis Hyde Ellis

BRACE yourselves everyone, because this is the Renault 5 Turbo 3E: a hand-built, mostly carbon-fibre, hot hatch on steroids that packs supercar levels of power and is designed to go sideways, yet amazingly, is totally road legal.

It’s the descendent of what were unquestionably the maddest hot hatches the eighties produced: the rally-bred, mid-engined Renault 5 Turbo, and the later Turbo 2.

Yes, the new model is an EV, but it has stuck to the same radical formula as the originals by shoving a high-performance, rear-wheel-drive powertrain into a pocket-sized package sporting bonkers bodywork and an equally outrageous interior. In fact, the Turbo 3E shares almost nothing with the new Renault 5 EV or its spicier sister car, the Alpine A290.

The styling of the new Turbo 3E is remarkably close to its ancestors from the eighties, along with the somehow even crazier-looking concept model with the same name that Renault unveiled in 2021.

The company’s design team came up with the idea for the concept, when the brand was looking to prove it can “make electric cars interesting and exciting,” according to its design boss, Gilles Vidal, rather than “those robotic, white, sluggish things you see driving about.”