Just how well does the new Renault 5 shape up as an electric supermini?

It took a surprising amount of sniffing around until I managed to find a dusty old Renault 5 and wedge our shiny green machine alongside for a family photo. And this was the south of France where the climate is kind to old bangers, even ones that ended production three decades ago.

Only a very few years ago it would have been easy. Most villages had a one man band garage with a petrol pump and dark messy service bay, its walls covered with rusting enamel signs: Cibié, Kléber, Yacco. Round the back you’d glimpse semi-abandoned Renaults and Peugeots, the more senior of them with the telltale yellow headlights. That, in my mind’s eye, was to have been our ideal photo location. If Renault’s hype machine wants us to recall the original 5, very well, we’d do it with an elegantly shabby example, scrapyard dog in the background yanking ominously at its chain.

France held out much longer than Britain against the march of the shiny glass palace corporate franchised car dealerships, but now it’s gone that way too. So your village garagiste, his lifespan doubtless curtailed by decades of drawing at a Gitane while pumping leaded four star, is now as hard to find as your original R5.

Photography: Jonny Fleetwood

The new R5 is bigger and fancier and electric. Well of course the R5 has changed. France has changed. Just along from its garage, each village would have a bar tabac and a boulangerie. Last summer I cycled across France. I expected to stop every couple of hours at one of those for a grand crème and a bun – pain aux raisins in the morning and religieuse in the afternoon thanks very much. In the end I nearly always went hungry and suffered persistently high levels of blood in my caffeine stream. Those pivots of village life have disappeared. Maybe it was the pandemic that did for them but I guess general social change and urbanisation has been the bigger driver, leaving the rural communities as little more than overconserved tourist attractions.

The new 5 can’t just be a conserved trinket, relying on some sort of folk memory of French chic. To people over 50, the original 5 is a memory bathed in golden sunlight, our parents’ car or our first. But to anyone younger that, it probably means nothing. So the new 5 has to be an attractive and appealing car in itself.

And is. Appealing in the looks, yes, but also made and detailed to be a quality object. The lights and jewellery and big wheels on the outside, and inside the materials and touchpoints are well chosen. This is a mid-spec one, with the longer range 52kWh battery for 255 miles of range. It’s propelled by a 150bhp high voltage rare earth free electric motor, gets to 62mph in eight seconds, runs multi-link rear suspension and has a heat pump. So £27k is a pretty solid bargain.

The four-cornered motif in the headlights winks as you approach. The foglights have the same graphic, and so do the dashboard vents. The rear lights refer to the MkII Supercinq R5, the one-piece seatbacks to the Gordini version and the wheelarches to the mad mid-engined 5 Turbo rally car. The very first R5 had a bonnet vent. Here it’s not a vent but a state of charge indicator. So the new 5’s design is a remix with plenty of samples, not an obsessively pure cover version.

Inside, we find more backward-slash-forward glances. The dash has stitching to emulate the original car’s ridged plastic moulding and the headlining distantly resembles a rattan basket. The binnacle is a similar rectangular shape to the original’s. But of course this time around it houses flatscreens running the driver interface we’ve praised in other Renaults. Around that, and on the steering column, a population of well placed real switches make it quick and easy to operate with your eyes on the road. You sit low, with no sense of being perched on a battery. It’s compact even for a supermini mind, so rear legroom is tight but not inhumane.

Stuck in traffic in Nice, it’s unsurprisingly a centre of attraction. It copes happily with the city – the accelerator takes up smoothly, the brakes are progressive at easy speeds, it’s little and nippy and easy to see out of. But I want to be away from here. Up in the hills are roads I’ve often used for testing supercars and hot hatches. Why go there in an electric supermini? Because between the wide open stretches they have narrow twists and bumps where a decent low power car should be able to show off a bit. And a ropey one will stumble.

The R5 gets up the slopes well. It's 150bhp is just enough zip for 1,400kg. The Route Napoleon and Col de Vence don’t defeat it. The steering response, at first blush, is proportional but a little numb. Still, that makes it easy to drive smoothly, and it (mostly) masks torque steer. Besides, the body is allowed to roll, giving you a sense of what’s going on and helping the inside front wheel with traction. Get keener and the picture brightens. The steering becomes a clearer window to the road, and this happy little car avoids any nose heavy attitude and doesn’t wash its front tyres wide. When grip does run out, it’s likely to be from both ends, and you can tuck the nose in some more with a little accelerator lift. It’s pretty engaging.

Of course, in pursuit of that cornering precision it can’t ride like an original 5. And you wouldn’t want it to – those early ones wobbled and heaved like they’d been too long on the pastis. At town speed the springing feels taut, but never harsh or noisy. As you get moving on bumpy roads, the setup will take the big hits quite deftly. Because the anti-roll bars can be soft thanks to the low centre of gravity, you’re not rocked about, and the sophisticated rear suspension keeps high frequency harshness well under control. This refinement, as with the progressive pedals and steering, make the R5 feel like a bigger more grownup car when that’s what you want.

It’s clever too. Climbing up into the mountains I’d put a significant dent in the battery. In most electric cars the range guessometer and satnav would have been equally pessimistic for the journey back. But the 5’s systems know about gravity, and predicted, as turned out to be the case, that it’d take me only two per cent to get the 30 miles back to the coast. Thank you, regenerative braking.

When a car has been made by people who love it, it shows

It’s also got bidirectional charging to the grid, so on a home socket you can buy electricity overnight and sell back when the price rises, subsidising your ownership. Less smart is the so-called AI assistant, Reno. Its avatar looks like a very slightly fattened-up version of Clippy the Microsoft paperclip and nearly every question I asked just got a shrug and an apologetic eyeroll. It demeans this lovely and smart car.

Still, in an original 5 you’d have been lucky to have had a radio cassette never mind AI. The new 5, as I say, is not an old 5. And yet... it’s freighted with significance, just as the first 5 was in 1972. Both mark a pivot from one world era to another and one kind of motoring to another. There’s something else.

Back when incoming boss Luca de Meo gave the nod to the new 5, the pandemic was raging, car companies were in huge trouble and most of us smartarse commentators were assuming Renault would be the most likely company to fail. Instead it’s now doing fine, because the spirit of the place is revived. Developing the 5 has been an internal totem. Remaking one of Renault’s 24-carat greatest hits has galvanised everyone in the company to pour their uttermost efforts into it. Designers and engineers worked most of the way round the clock to perfect it. And when a car has been made by people who love it, it shows.