I am very grateful to have gotten the opportunity to test a Renault 5 for a few days.
Renault 5 feels like it has a well balanced chassis and curve dynamic, that delivers excitement.
Whereas my Prius has a far better and superbly stable and competent feel with any speed, quiet and robust, the Renault already feels exciting at lower speeds in a way like these first Mini BMW cars with the Tritec motors that delivered some sort of haptic “action”.
One could call Renault a car that delivers some lack of dampening as excitement, and I think it does so very well.
The B-mode with energy recuperation is a very intelligent way to go about electric energy. I was quite impressed there.
However, electric car driving brings about a relevant amount of “parking” in that one sits in the parked car. Finding a charger that works still feels like an odyssey. And with that I require a sufficient support.
Irritating aspect there was to me, that with turning the “ignition” off, at once the window levers stop working while radio etc still keep doodling. There’s a certain amount of lack of predictability.
So I would turn the ignition back on but then parts of that seem to become auto disabled a short amount of time later, such as the window levers.
On a hot dense parking spot with variable occupancy, and with variable own activities related to own privacy such as making private phone calls, that felt very irritating.
Also, for some reason, the Renault 5 seems to aggressively recruit my mobile phone into connection to the car speakers/audio, even when I explicitly turn the phone’s Bluetooth connection off: car turns that back on without asking. While that may be cool when I just hop in to drive and forgot to turn on Bluetooth on my phone, it’s not cool when parking/charging while making phone calls. So charging has aspects of privacy and business etiquette in a technical sense.
During various states of the dashboard, in the parked charging R5, I was unable to deterministically command my telephone into behaving like just a telephone, whereas car and phone seemed to become an inseparable but unforeseeably controlled unit that never knew when exactly to fuse and let go of each other.
While doing a number of important phone calls, that felt super strange and I must say that I now take cherish the predictability of the similar dashboard on/off user interface of my Prius.
An electric car ** must ** have a parking/charge mode that accommodates and affords the user/driver sitting (and living, working, watching videos, …) with safety, predictability, authority over relevant aspects, and with comfort, also (but not only) with regards to allowing windows to stay functional.
Maybe a reliable and stable separate state – between off/not using the car and on/driving – is needed. That requires a new so far non existent model of UI.
Also, while driving, sometimes my cell phone audio – attached via Bluetooth – wouldn’t allow the volume buttons of that strange right side hidden audio control lever to change music volume. I’m a right below elbow amputee, and never had that much problems with out of reach audio control as in this car. The other volume controls are on top of the dashboard, totally out of reach. And it can’t be voice controlled easily. While Android auto otherwise seemed to blend nicely with the car, audio felt strangely unpredictable. And for me, with my disability, hard to impossible to access.
It then is irrelevant to state that the R5’s Harman Kardon speakers always sounded tinny and not nearly as nice as my old Prius built in JBL system. There’s just not even a comparison.
Since Diesel gate, with legendary Swiss distributor behavior, where virtually no one seemed to get compensation, and since my Subaru Outback, that had terrible head unit glitches all the time, lack of function left and right, with Swiss distributor “knowing nothing about that at all” (while there were already class lawsuits in the US regarding that), I’m mostly interested in a solid predictable and stable function as is, as my Prius so far offered. And not, what any manufacturer has to say.
Instead, I think a multi day deep evaluation of any new car purchase is warranted and justified if not necessary. Particularly if the cars seem to look pretty and feel great in a ~1/2 h short evaluation.
A deeper reason I spent three days driving this Renault was that my father, who just died, had been an avid Renault fan and grew up with Renault 4, Renault 16 and Renault 30 as his family car, which he drove often violently which caused everyone, given the mostly soft suspensions, to vomit every time the drive exceeded some 15 or 20 minutes. With that, I spent a free day on curved mountain roads, going explicitly careful and cautious, nothing abrupt, just to see if Renault cars also allowed a more subtle driving style.
