Renault Clio review

Surprisingly mature. There are pseudo-MacPherson struts up front and a twist-beam (torsion bar) in the rear, all tuned to ride with a bit more squish than you might expect. It means the Clio rides smoothly and quietly, which gives it proper grown up road manners. More importantly for us it manages to blend this comfort with a zesty chassis. It doesn’t really come alive until you’re up beyond the pace that most Clios will ever travel at, but go there and you discover a talented chassis that makes you bemoan the demise of RenaultSport.

The steering is a bit light at all speeds to add further satisfaction to the cornering experience, but the chief downside is the Clio loses interest at ordinary speeds. You have to deliberately search out thrills, rather than having them piped to you all the time. That was the Fiesta’s secret sauce. But the brakes are strong and progressive, while the clutch and six-speed manual are light and easy. It’s really a very tidy car to travel about in.

Anything to get excited about?

Let’s just put a bit more flesh on the bones of the Renaultsport question. It’s not just a question of Renault’s willingness to build hot hatches and find a market for them, but the production complexities. Renaultsport models were built at Dieppe, a plant that was reconfigured to make way for the Alpine A110 a few years back. Renaultsport lost its home. Regular Clios are built at plants in Slovenia and Turkey – there’s no reason those plants couldn’t build fast versions – but Renault, like everyone else, has to invest in electric ahead of doing any more fun stuff. In other words, precious little to get excited about for the foreseeable future.

Talk to me about comfort then.

Of far more real-world relevance is the fact that this version rides very well. The suspension isolates you from rough surfaces better than you’d expect for a car in this class, and also recovers from bumps and potholes quickly, so you don’t spend every mile of your journey being jiggled about.

There’s also very little engine or wind noise at motorway speeds: tyre roar is usually the dominant sound, depending on how smooth the tarmac is. Combined with its compliant nature, this means the Clio is relaxing to cruise along in. One thing to be aware of: visibility isn’t the best on account of the tiny rear window.

What of the engines?

At launch you’d have had several options, but now there are only two: the 1.0-litre turbocharged TCe 90 (89bhp, 0-62mph in 12.2s, 54.3mpg, 118g/km CO2) or the hybrid 1.6-litre E-Tech 140 (143bhp, 0-62mph in 9.3s, 65.7mpg, 97g/km CO2).

The first of those comes with a six-speed manual gearbox, (the old TCe 100’s five-speed has gone the way of the dodo) while the latter gets a six-speed automatic. The price difference between the two is a chunky £3,500. The TCe tries hard and stays pretty smooth across the rev range but is gutless. But you expect that. The bigger issue is the throttle lag which makes it very hard to drive smoothly. The delay between you pressing the pedal and something happening is way too big, so you find yourself trying to drive around the problem, and that’s not relaxing.

We suspect this lag is there to help the engine meet emissions regulations, but it has the side effect of undermining your confidence in the car.

How's the hybrid?

Hybridisation is a welcome addition to the Clio line-up: in mixed driving we saw fuel economy in the high 50mpgs without really trying (to be fair the TCe was impressively economical as well, recording broadly similar figures). It’s a full hybrid: all the power ultimately comes from the fuel tank and you can’t charge it with a plug, but there’s a 48bhp electric motor and 1.2kWh battery that’s capable of zero-emissions driving in very short bursts. Renault reckons you’ll do 80 per cent of your urban trips in EV mode.

The Clio’s hybrid system is a little more complicated than that (there’s another e-motor that replaces the alternator, powers the gearbox and harvests energy from the brakes - read more about that here) but all you really need to know is that it behaves like any other auto: perfectly happy at normal speeds, but a bit lazy to shift if you give it full throttle. Which you’ll hardly ever do.

One thing we have noticed with the hybrid, though: it has a habit of boosting the engine revs in order to charge the battery. That means you can be sitting quite happily at a steady speed only for the revs to jump without warning. At first it’s confusing, then it’s just irritating as you plod along as though you’re in too low a gear.