Renault has turned an old 4 into a moving hotel room

Well, this isn’t what we expected to see today. Renault has teamed up with designer Mathieu Lehanneur as part of its year-long celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Renault 4.

This is the SUITE N°4 – a ‘concept car’ that’s 60 years old and is apparently designed to act as a ‘nomad hotel suite’. Has nobody at Renault heard of campervans? Anyway, trigger warning: there’s some design speak coming up…

“SUITE N°4 opens the door to a new kind of mobility that strives to make people live experiences,” says Lehanneur. 

“I wanted to merge the worlds of cars and architecture to create an open-air hotel room. Even better than the finest palatial suite, the car is exactly where you want it to be, whether that’s by the sea, in the middle of a field or driving around the city you’ve always dreamed of.”

So, the Four has had its rear bodywork chopped up and replaced with polycarbonate windows and transparent solar panels. Those solar panels provide energy to the battery, which in turn powers an electric motor that drives the wheels. Yep, it’s technically another classic EV conversion. 

There’s a strange polished aluminium replacement to the grille too, as well as three layers of paint that apparently make the 4 look like it’s made from cement.