Has a coronation been arranged for our outgoing sporty hybrid supermini?
KRIS CULMER
FINAL REPORT
MILEAGE 12,126
WHY WE RAN IT
To see if the Clio is the heir apparent to the Ford Fiesta’s ‘default buy’ throne
It’s very rare that I get to keep a car for as long as I have this one. What great fortune, then, that it should turn out to be one of my favourite long-termers in eight years of doing this job, and one I have had no difficulty finding things to write about (unlike a fair few I could mention).
My Renault Clio hasn’t been flawless, regrettably, as many of my past long-termers have been. It intermittently irritated me with rattles from the dashboard and driver’s door; its stereo volume controls suffered a glitch that occasionally made me look like an ass in public; its Apple CarPlay integration tripped up a couple of times; and its parking sensors once went haywire. Yet despite all of that, I already miss it like an old friend.
Primary among its qualities for me was the fuel efficiency, and consequently also the cost efficiency, of Renault’s E-Tech Full Hybrid powertrain, which combined a 1.6-litre four-cylinder petrol engine with an electric motor and a small drive battery by way of a unique transmission so fiendishly complex that I still have to refresh my memory every time I need to explain exactly how it works (which does give me some concerns about long-term reliability, but only time can tell on that front). This resulted in 53.5mpg over the course of my 10,000 miles with the car, and it even refused to drop below 50mpg when two friends and I did a trip to Belgium that included some unrestricted stretches of autobahn, which is just incredibly impressive (thanks not least to it recuperating 24kWh of energy, as revealed by the trip computer, and while in ‘D’ mode rather than regen-heavy ‘B’).
During that time, my mates also had no major complaints about practicality, despite both being over 6ft tall and the car carrying plenty of luggage. It was just the lack of separate air vents and cupholders for the rear seats that bothered them. Meanwhile, the Clio pleased me with sensible touches like digital switches for turning the instrument dials from imperial to metric and the headlight beams from left- to right-leaning.
If I’m sounding prosaic here, let me assure you that the Clio was simultaneously a whole lot of fun. I’m still not entirely convinced by the Renault Group’s strategy of applying blue ‘A’ branding to everyday Renault models, even if it is
