Renault design boss: "the spiritual successor to the R4 is the Dacia Duster"

OK, brace yourself for some new design jargon. Renault Group head of design Laurens van den Acker now distinguishes between 'spiritual retro' and 'stylistic retro'.

The Renault 5 and new Twingo are 'spiritual retro'. They do the same job as the cars they reference. The 5 in its day was a chic but cheap and economical urban car. So is the new one. The first-gen Twingo was actually one of the cheapest new cars on sale in its day, and the new one will also have its price pared to the bone.

By contrast, van den Acker says the new 4 is 'stylistic retro'. It has lots of visual nods to the original, but it has a different role. The 1961 one was a simple rural car, but the new one is smart and fairly upmarket for a little crossover. It'll cost about £5k more than an R5.

"Actually the spiritual successor to the R4 is the Dacia Duster." Cheap, versatile, robust, no-frills. Yeah, that's about right.

The Twingo will be even less expensive than the R5, which is £23k and up. It's smaller, has less kit and will have a lower-range battery of lower-cost LFP chemistry. But at the moment it's not confirmed for right-hand drive, because with car that conversion costs money.

Van den Acker wants to emphasise the new 5, 4 and Twingo aren't just copies of old cars. He asks us to imagine there was a series of missing intermediate generations between the originals and the new ones, like a 911 has all those actual generations. "No-one calls a new 911 retro even though you can recognise the original in it."

Is it creatively bankrupt to plunder old cars rather than invent new ones? "I give myself a break because I did so many really new things – the DeZir, Trezor, some autonomous concepts, the [Mk4] Clio and Captur. But anyway, the 4 and 5 and Twingo weren't easy. We could have screwed them up.

"I've never done a car that gets so much love as the 5 and what's the worth of that? It's our job to do products that make people happy. And only we can do those cars. No-one can copy them."