Renault Reviews

You’ve no doubt heard the term ‘design by committee’, which is another way of describing what happens when too many people have too much input in a creative project, and so the end result has had any unique or interesting features beaten right out of it.Well, I have another term for your lexicon. And that is ‘design by France’. And that, it seems, is the complete opposite, where just one person says ‘I think our family focused electric SUV should look like a muscular hot hatch. Throw those 20-inch alloys on it, too. Oh, and I want so many stalks behind the steering wheel that it feels like the driver is lost in a corn field.”Case in point? The Renault Scenic E-Tech Esprit Alpine (even the name is faintly ridiculous). On paper, none of the above would make much sense. But in an electrified world awash with same-same design (take amorphous blob, apply wheels), the Renault is a breath of fresh air.The matt grey paint and black roof of our test car (+$1300) surely helps, but the Esprit Alpine looks good/different, and its tough, muscular design only further grew on me.Inside, the good/different continues with Renault making some clever material choices, including the couch-like fabric (which turned out to be kenaf, a plant fibre) stretching across the dashboard and up the A-pillars. It gives the cabin a warm, modern and more environmentally conscious feel than the usual slabs of black plastic or synthetic leather.Less immediately positive is the congregation of stalks behind the steering wheel, with the gear selector, windscreen wiper stalk and separate media-control unit all clustered together. Add to that one of the flappy paddles that controls the regen braking and it's a busy place behind the wheel.Truthfully, it’s fine and fairly intuitive once you know where everything is, but it is confusing at first.In more good news, Renault hasn’t buried everything behind the vertical 12.0-inch central screen and horizontal 12.3-inch digital driver display (all angled toward the driver), either. There are physical air-con controls, steering-wheel buttons and mercifully the ability to adjust your wing mirrors from the driver's window panel.The tech generally works well, too. Wireless Apple CarPlay was flawless on test, and there’s a wireless phone charger that holds your phone in place, which is rarer than you might think. There’s also a deep storage area under the centre console, more space under the armrest and twin USB-C ports up front, though the single cupholder reminds you this is still a fairly compact-feeling vehicle in places.The front of the cabin can feel a little tight in terms of width and not all of the materials are winners. Some of the door plastics feel cheap, and that is even more obvious in the back seat, where the door trims and some of the other plastics don't feel overly premium.But space in the back is impressive. Sitting behind my own 175cm driving position, I had enough knee room to properly stretch out and the flat floor means the middle-seat passenger isn’t forced to straddle a transmission tunnel.There are two ISOFIX points, rear air vents, twin USB-C ports and a very clever fold-down centre armrest with cupholders and some extra storage built in.The boot isn’t huge in length, but it is deep and tall, and will swallow a total of 545 litres with the rear seats in place, or 1670 with them folded flat. A bit like the rest of the 4470mm-long, 1864mm-wide and 1565mm-high Scenic, then, in that none of it feels massive, but it does feel cleverly packaged.The nuts and bolts are positive, too. While lesser Scenic models get 125kW and 280Nm, this flagship model ups that to 160kW and 300Nm, produced via a front-mounted electric motor that delivers a sprint to 100km/h in 7.9 seconds.It gets the biggest battery, too, an 87kWh lithium-ion unit that delivers an impressive WLTP range of 625km. Charging is 11kW AC, or 150kW DC, the latter below average in a world of faster-charging EVs.On the road, the Scenic is a more complicated thing. It has all the ingredients that should make it one of my favourite driving cars. The steering is quite natural feeling, there's a firmness to the suspension that doesn't disconnect you from the road below and the acceleration is perky enough without being brutal.But it's the way those ingredients are put together that takes more getting used to than I expected. It feels as though the sensitivity has been dialled right up to the point where it can feel overly reactive to inputs, and as the brake pedal doesn't always feel linear in its application, it can end up feeling a bit jerky on the road.It just takes some getting used to with your inputs to smooth out the drive experience, and I should point out that my test was exclusively in greater Sydney, and the Scenic feels like a car that would really shine on flowing roads out of town.Still, it feels a cut above plenty of newcomer EVs from behind the wheel. There is a connection to what's going on beneath the tyres that's missing from some newer brands and there's very little in the way of motion sickness-inducing body roll from the Scenic's chassis.And perhaps best of all, I covered plenty of kilometres and all sorts of road conditions, and the active safety systems remained mostly quiet, calm and blissfully quiet throughout.Downsides? The reversing camera is poor. It has a weird fisheye effect that makes judging your surroundings harder than it should be, to the point where you end up relying on mirrors and old-fashioned shoulder checks instead.At five years or 100,000km, the warranty is way off the pace, too.And it isn't challenger-brand cheap. My car is $65,990, before on road costs, and before you add the $1300 in paint and roof. That’s real money. The longer-range Tesla Model Y is $68,900 MSRP. But the mid-tier Kia EV5 Earth is $64,990, and adds a second motor and AWD. That said, though, there is a cheaper Renault, still with the long-range battery, that starts below $60k. Still, what price a little joie de vivre?

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The flagship Scenic E-Tech Esprit Alpine is priced at $59,990, before on-road costs.

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