1964 Renault R4 Reviews

No matter who you are or where you live, the first question anyone who is about to dip their toe into the electrified water of EV ownership asks is always the same; how long does it take charge an electric car? (Followed by, can I have a Tesla please?)The answer is a complicated one, I’m afraid, as it depends on the car and the charging infrastructure, but the short answer is this; not as long you might think, and that figure is dropping all the time. Nor, as most people tend to think, is it likely that you’ll need to charge it every day, but that’s another story.The easiest way to explain it all is to examine those two elements - what kind of car do you own and what kind of charging station will you be using - separately, so you have all the facts at your fingertips. What type of car do you own?As it stands, there are really only a handful of pure-electric cars on sale in Australia at the moment, with products from Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Renault, Jaguar and Hyundai. Though that number will grow, of course, with models due from Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Kia and more - and political pressure building to increase the number of EVs on our roads.Each of those brands quotes different charging times (largely dependent on the size of each car's battery packs).Nissan says charging its Leaf from zero to full can take up to 24 hours using the standard power at your house, but if you invest in a special 7kW home charger the recharge time drops to around 7.5hrs. If you use a rapid charger, you can top up the battery from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in around an hour. But we’ll come back to charger types in a moment. Then there’s Tesla; the brand that made EVs cool measures its charge time on a distance-per-hour scale. So for the Model 3, you’ll get around 48km in range for every hour of charging that your car is plugged in at home. A Tesla Wall Box or an on-the-road Supercharger will significantly reduce that time, of course.Enter Jaguar, with its i-Pace SUV. The British brand (the first of the traditional premium marques to get an EV to marker) claims an 11km per hour recharge rating using home power. The bad news? That roughly equals 43 hours for a full charge, which seems staggeringly impractical. Installing a special home charger (which most owners will) increases that rate to 35km of range per hour.Finally, we’ll look at Hyundai’s just-launched Kona Electric. The brand says from empty to 80 per cent of charge takes nine hours and 35 minutes, using a home wall unit, or 75 minutes using a fast-charging station. Plugged into the mains at home? That’ll be 28 hours for a full charge of the battery pack.How long do the batteries in an electric car last? The sad truth is that they begin to degrade, albeit slowly, from the first time you recharge, but most manufacturers offer an eight-year battery warranty if something should go wrong. What kind of electric car charger do you use?Ah, this is the part that really matters, as the type of charger you use to power you EV can cut time off the road to a fraction of that you’d spend if you only do your top up by drawing mains power.While it’s true that most people think they’ll be charging their vehicle at home, simply plugging it into the mains when they get home from work, that’s actually the slowest way to pump juice into your batteries. The most common alternative is to invest in “wall box” infrastructure at home, be it from the manufacture themselves of via an aftermarket provider like Jet Charge, which increases the rapid flow of power to the car, usually to around 7.5kW.The most well-known solution is Tesla’s Wall Box, which can up the power output to 19.2kW - enough to deliver 71km per hour of charging for the Model 3, 55km for the Model S and 48km for the Model X.But just as with an internal-combustion-engined vehicle, you can still recharge while on the road, and when you do, you don’t want to spend the better part of an entire day glued to a power point. Enter, then, fast charging stations, which are specifically set up to get you on the road as quickly as possible using a 50kW or a 100kW flow of power.Again, the best-known of these are the Tesla Superchargers, which have started being phased in on freeways and in cities on the east coast of Australia, and which recharge you battery pack to 80-per-cent full in around 30 minutes. They were once (unbelievably) free to use, but that was only ever going to last so long. There are other options, of course. Most notably the NRMA, which has begun the roll out of a free-for-members network of 40 fast-charging stations around Australia. Or Chargefox, which is in the process of installing “ultra-fast” charging stations in Australia, promising between 150kW and 350kW of power, which can deliver some 400km of range in 15 minutes. Porsche is also planning to rollout its own chargers around the world, which are, cleverly, called Turbo Chargers.

We spend weeks comparing new car performance and prices... then fall for a shiny one.

The current generation Renault Trafic has become an increasingly strong contender in Australia's competitive mid-sized commercial van market since its debut in 2015.

If you know the Renault Megane RS range, you know the Trophy model is the top-of-the-pops variant in the standard range. Does it live up to expectations?

Renault Australia has extended its capped-price service plans from three to five years for its light-commercial range, encompassing the Kangoo, Trafic and Master models.Dubbed 'Easy Life' by Renault, the program is designed to assuage business customers o

Renault Australia has rolled out the limited-run Koleos Black Edition with a number of equipment enhancements priced at $36,990 drive-away.Building on the Zen grade, which starts at $35,990 before on-road costs, Renault claims it has added $3000 worth of

It's been a rough year for new vehicle sales.

Coming together in a time of crisis is what true partners do. And it seems the current global situation has forced Renault and Nissan to put aside their differences and come up with a new plan for its shaky Alliance; which also includes Mitsubishi.

If ever there was a time to grab a new-car bargain, it’s now. This month, and in the lead up to the end of this financial year, spells a perfect storm for deals as people stay indoors because of the virus, new-car sales shrink for the 26th consecutive month, and ships still arrive in Australian ports loaded with lots of fresh vehicles.There’s only one way this can end - moving cars at discount prices. Here’s some of the biggest savings on the market - and there’s lots more coming here so keep reading CarsGuide.It’s not peanuts, either, with discounts of up to more than $10,000 off the recommended retail prices as listed by the car-makers and the dealers.10. BMW 118i M Sport automatic. Normally $52,329. Now $49,900 drive away with Enhancement package of panoramic roof, metallic paint and adaptive cruise control (worth $2900). Saving 4.6% ($2429).9. Volkswagen T-Cross 85TSI Life automatic. Normally $32,643. Now $29,990 drive away. Saving 8.2% or $2653.8. Mazda2 G15 Pure manual. Normally $24,515. Now $21,990 drive away. Saving 10.3% or $2525. Evolve automatic is now $25,490, saving $2668 or 9.5%.7. Hyundai i30 Go hatch automatic. Normally $26,331. Now $23,470 with on-road costs and warranty extended to seven years. Saving 10.9% ($2861).6. Mitsubishi ASX ES auto. Normally $30,039. Now $26,740 drive away. Saving 11% ($3299).5. Mitsubishi Outlander ES automatic 7-seater. Normally $36,082. Now $31,490 drive away. Saving 12.7% or $4592. 4. Renault Koleos Life automatic. Normally $36,766. Now $31,990 drive away. Saving 13% ($4776). More upmarket Zen version is now $35,990 including on-road costs, saving 10.9% ($4419).3. Suzuki Swift GL Navigator automatic with Safety Pack. Normally $23,365. Now $19,990 drive away with full safety suite and sat-nav. Saving 14.4% ($3375).2. MG MG3 Excite automatic. Normally $21,861. Now $18,490 including on-road costs and comes with leather seats, sat-nav and seven-year unlimited kilometre warranty and seven-year roadside assistance. Saving 15.4% ($3371).1. Nissan 370Z 50th Anniversary manual. Normally $59,936. Now $49,990 drive away. Saving 16.6% ($9936). The automatic is now $52,490 including on-road costs, saving $10,108 or 16.1%.

Pick-ups, or utes as we call them in Australia, are our continent’s most competitive segment an automaker can play in – but they present unique design challenges that are sought after by Europe’s car designers.This is according to Renault’s Francois Leboine, who elaborated greatly on the very idea of designing a pick-up truck when CarsGuide simply asked if he would like to design one.“For Renault, pick-ups are a limited field,” he said. “We have Alaskan, which is [Renault/Nissan/Mitsubishi] alliance, and another which is based on the Dacia Duster.“But as a designer, I would absolutely love to draw a pick-up, especially a big one, it’s an old dream of European designers. We don’t see them on the streets, designers love to work on something they are not usually exposed to.”Renault has toyed with the idea of launching the Nissan Navara-based Alaskan to our market for some time, and has even done some sums in the past to see if it was worth importing the Dacia Duster-based Oroch.It seems neither has made it as far as a confirmation, with the most recent news from the brand’s local product manager Charly Clercin suggesting that that European-spec Alaskan truck simply isn’t right for for the Australian market.“We looked into it and we couldn’t get the car we wanted out of the factory. Local development costs would have added too much to the price,” he told CarsGuide in November 2019.While details are light on the ground, the Oroch could stand a better chance for an Australian launch, as its Duster sibling is already offered in right-hand-drive configuration for South Africa.Renault has stated to Australian media before that the Oroch could be a viable option in a sub-$35,000 bracket, with a near-700kg payload having once been offered by the Australian-made Ford Falcon and Holden Commodore utes.The current Oroch, which dates back to 2015, is front-wheel drive and offered with either a 1.6- or 2.0-litre engine. A new generation is due imminently, and it could be then that we learn more about any Australian launch plans.On the topic of pick-up designs, Mr Leboine had good things to say about Tesla’s Cybertruck, however.“As a design exercise, it’s perfect,” he said. “There’s no better way to be recognised as a designer than to design something simple. It’s iconic, there is a brutality to it.“Could I do something like this? I don’t know… but as a design exercise I love it.”