No German engineer would think of making a structural headliner. Wouldn’t happen. You make the roof of the car strong, and you add a headliner to keep the noise down: logical, sensible, safe. French engineering, on the other hand? That’s a whole different kettle of poisson. Remove the diamond-stamped headliner in this 1986 Renault Le Car, and the roof will flop around, as flimsy as a crêpe. That’s not sensible. That’s genius.
“The visibility’s great,” says owner Bruce Larson. “Which is good because that’s all you’ve got for safety.”
Parping furiously, the little French hatchback attacks a sweeping corner with terrier-like tenacity, flopping over on its soft, torsion-bar suspension. Larson’s already told me off for being too gentle on the car – “Drive more French” – and the Renault does indeed seem to soak up the abuse. And speaking of safety, it’s not like anyone’s in danger from this René Arnoux impression. Peak power from the 1.3L four-cylinder engine is less than 60 hp, and there are only four forward gears.
Larson’s Le Car is truly a last of breed machine. By the time it hit the road, Renault had already exited the Canadian market. The car had been hanging around in an AMC showroom for ages, and was among the last handful of Renaults to be registered in B.C. It’s the perfect time capsule to help the plucky R5 celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Even in French-speaking Quebec, most average folks perhaps don’t have the fondest memories of Renault. The company’s cars were popular for a time, even inspiring the homegrown Manic GT, an obscure little lightweight sports car. But by the time the likes of the Renault Alliance sedan arrived, French mechanical quirkiness had lost a bit of its charm in the face of unrelenting Japanese-made reliability. The Renault Alliance sounds a bit like something from a French version of Star Wars, and you could say it failed to defeat the menace of Darth Mechanical Failure.
Where the Le Car was concerned, the villain was Emperor Rust. These little cars were thinly constructed, and once the rot got in, that was it. The Renault 5 is one of the best-selling cars of all time, and thousands found homes in Canadian driveways. You never see them any more because they mostly disintegrated.
This state of affairs is a very great shame because the Renault 5 was absolutely brilliant. When it arrived in 1972, it beat the Golf to market as one of the earliest European hatchbacks. It was inexpensive to run, thrifty to fuel, and completely practical.
This is a seriously tiny car, a foot shorter in length than a first-generation Miata. It’s also short in height, and the 13-inch wheels on this version are actually the upgrade package. Every parking stall feels like driving into a barn, so you can see why the Renault 5 quickly became the car to have in the mass homicidal mania that is Parisian traffic.
It is ingenious in its simplicity. Instead of a door handle, you get a button and a flange to the metal. Instead of a gas strut to prop open the hatchback, there’s an elegant metal arm with nothing to break. To save space, the tire can fit next to the engine (this example’s slightly larger wheel has to go in the trunk). There are little pockets everywhere in the cabin, making the most of storage in a car with a tiny footprint.
At the time, it was also a very stylish car. Looking at the car now, it’s very 1980s in design, but remember that it came out in the early 1970s — it was a vision of a future to come. The R5 was practical and pragmatic, but it was also chic and unbound by class. Think of a French take on the original Mini. It was effortlessly cool.
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Hoping to trade on some of that languid French glamour, Renault brought the Renault 5 to Canada in 1976. To amplify the Frenchness, they called it simply “Le Car,” leading me today to have to use tortured sentence structures like “the Le Car.” The Le Car was not very popular in the U.S., but sold reasonably well in Canada. My Paris-born godmother had a red one.
In Europe, the R5 proved so popular that there was even a one-make race series. Perhaps to stimulate sluggish U.S. sales, Renault also took the Le Car racing on this side of the Atlantic, in the SCCA’s Class C Showroom Stock. Surprisingly, the little French hatchback whipped everyone else. The SCCA performance upgrades were subsequently made available as a package from local Renault and AMC dealers.
The version that got everyone hot and bothered was never offered here: the Renault 5 Turbo. In an even-crazier-than-usual fit of French engineering, Renault stuffed a turbocharged engine in the rear and fitted massively wide rear fender flares. Femme fatale Fatima Blush used one to chase James Bond through the narrow, twisting streets of Never Say Never Again.
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
Renault R5 Le Car Photo by Brendan McAleer
But on its 50th anniversary, the R5’s real heroism is not to be found in some crazy wide-haunched homologation special. The appeal is in the daily-driver approachability of Larson’s well-preserved machine. It’s foot-to-the-floor, use-all-the-tach, roll-through-the-corners motoring. It’s so much more fun to flog this thing below the speed limit than risk impound laws when using 50 per cent of the capability of any modern supercar.
Renault left Canada in the late 1980s, and we’ve mostly moved on from the breakup. But Renault, Nissan, and Mitsubishi are allies these days, and that means a small Renault hatchback rebadged as a Nissan isn’t out of the question.
Renault 5 Prototype Photo by Renault
Renault 5 Prototype Photo by Renault
A Renault 5 Turbo Photo by Renault
Something like the Renault 5 Prototype, an all-electric hatchback with the running gear of the Zoe EV. That means a 41-kW or 52-kW battery pack with around 300 km to 400 km of range. Many European critics have praised the Zoe for its fun-to-drive factor.
If Renault can keep the weight down by pulling inspiration from the clever tricks of the original R5, some of that magic could be reborn. And if Nissan decides the Leaf could use a stablemate with a little French flair in its showrooms, then we could once again return to a time of delightfully quirky European hatchbacks and awkward sentence structure. Once again, we could be saying, “the Le Car is simply wonderful.”
Keyword: Celebrating the forgotten Renault Le Car on its 50th anniversary