VIVELA RENAULTION!

Renault did a magnificent job with its revival of the 5 hatchback... turns out it was just getting warmed up

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Dateline Morocco, sometime in the mid 1990s. A white Renault 4 is ascending the 2,200m Tizi n’Tichka pass over the Atlas, gateway to the Sahara. I’m taking liberties with the primitive engine and brakes, using short straights between the hairpins for sneaky overtakes of all the other white Renault 4s. “It’s like being on a car launch,” says my passenger, who knows the things we young and stupid road testers got up to when let loose in a fleet of identical new cars. But these aren’t new. They’re bashed up renters. For many years, the white Renault 4 was the standard issue cheap hire car in Marrakech.

For decades that original R4, launched in 1961, did faithful service on many other thankless tasks in French-influenced parts of the world. It was cheap, versatile – the world’s first hatchback – simple, tough and utterly unpretentious. Renault sold a staggering 8.1 million. Yet most us have forgotten how successful the 4 was, doubtless because they've mostly decomposed now, much like our memory of them. So the new one has to stand on its own four wheels, rather than bask in reflected glory.

Especially as in spirit this new 4 isn’t a 4 at all. Not because it is electric, but because it isn’t especially cheap. If you want a modern Renault 4, a car designed with a gimlet eye to every conceivable means of saving a centime, Renault will soon have one. The electric Twingo.

That first 4 was a crossover decades before crossovers became a thing. If you want to find a survivor these days, go find an apparently deserted French farm at the top of a rough steep track. So Renault is being eminently sensible in selling the new 4 that way. As a crossover for the small family, it’s nicely sized, with an extra 80mm in the wheelbase versus the new 5.