0. Introduction

 

 

 

 

 

Let me present you with another post about stuff that is entirely unrelated to this blog. The last one was about a weird phone at least, but the one before it was about food of all things, I mean… So why not. This time it’s about my new car. And I don’t even know a lot about cars, I mean, I can refill engine oil and change light bulbs, but it pretty much ends there.

In any case, I’d been looking at the option of finally jumping in at the deep end by switching from combustion engine cars to a BEV, or battery-powered electric vehicle. At first I thought it would be a good idea to buy a demo car, a bit cheaper than a new one, but not a lot of kilometrage on it. I started looking for a Renault Zoe, because that’s a model that people have already collected lots of experience with (good and bad, but at least you’d know what to expect). Since I love warm colours I’d kept tabs on a model that looked exactly like this one and was in stock at a local car dealership:

But the problem was: They put it up for sale at a price of 34,999€. And that was just way too much in my opinion, especially since it wasn’t a fully equipped version, and the entire Zoe series was basically end-of-life as well. That would’ve cost me all my available cash and on top of that would’ve put my bank account into 4-digit reds at the time. That was in the beginning of 2024.

So I decided to wait and wait and wait… That’s when a (very) Francophile colleague of mine came into the office one day, evidently amused as he was telling us that “The Renault 5 is coming back and it’s gonna be an electric car!”. To my embarrassment (please forgive my ignorance!) I didn’t even know the classic Renault 5, even though it was an extremely successful car with over 9 million units produced from the 70s onwards into the early 90s. Well, I never paid much attention to classic cars, as they used to be more tool than passion for me. When said Zoe’s price had dropped to just 14,999€, it was easily cheap enough in my opinion. But by then I had lost all interest in it.

1. My personal car history

The reason for that is that when I looked the Renault 5 up on the web I fell in love pretty much immediately, with its looks and its lovely attention to detail! Especially after trying the online configurator! But it’s not all just looks as I’ll explain in a minute. Before showing you my biggest toy however, here’s a history of what I’ve driven before:

• A 1997 Volkswagen Golf 3, 75 hp in dark blue with a manual transmission as used to be very common in Europe. My mom gave it to me when I was around 20 years old, because she had stopped driving herself.
• A 1997 Mazda 323 with 73 hp, also a manual and in flashy red. I liked that car, but this specific model had extreme rust issues, so it didn’t live long. Bought from a good old friend.
• 1997 again: A Volkswagen Passat 3BG turbo-charged Diesel, 110 hp in dark green, manual transmission again. Fun and cheap to drive, but very dirty, carcinogenic exhaust fumes. Bought from another good friend who sold it to me for dirt cheap, for just 1,650€!
• A 2011 Dacia Duster in boring black, which I absolutely disliked. Cheap, soulless trash in my opinion. Plus I dislike SUVs. But the Passat was starting to break apart at just short of 400,000 km, and an uncle offered me his old Duster, so yeah. Manual again, came with a 110 hp flexible engine that could combust both petrol and ethanol.

2. The Renault 5

I went for a test drive in the last week of December, and when I returned the demo car, I just sat down at the sales guys’ desk, paused for a while, and then just told him: “Well, guess we’re gonna order a Renault 5.” to which he responded with a brief “Okay!”.

A bit over 2 months later, it arrived!

And here’s a snapshot of it (sorry for the poles being in the way):

Usually, posting cars without retouching the license plate on the Internet is highly unadvisable. In this case I could not resist however, because I just wanted to show off the vanity plate. Fits the car all too well!

This is the “large” version (if you can call it that) with 150 hp, 52 kWh battery in a yellow paint that has some mild “glitter” effect when exposed to sunlight. That plus the “twinkle” headlights give it a pretty cutesy look, whereas the rims and the red / black / yellow colour combination give it a bit of a sporty touch, or so I think at least.

Oh, by the way, the illuminated Renault logo you can see in the posts logo above isn’t actually there. Only the [concept car] had that. Too bad.

I don’t think I have to talk all that much about the car’s technical features. Anyone interested in this model will probably have seen Youtube videos about it already anyway. So I’ll try to keep it minimal. Here come some photos of the inside:

 

At least a few technical things: The seats feel awesome, hold you in quite well. The fabrics are nice to the touch. Most importantly though, it’s got loads of electromechanical buttons and wheels, so while actually driving you barely ever need to do anything on the touch screen. This I consider critical, because I can use mechanical buttons almost blindly, due to the haptic feedback. But using a touch screen is extremely distracting. For safety’s sake I’m supposed to keep my eyes on the road, not on some display in my car!

And here’s a closeup of that little insert box in the centre console, which is interesting, because like many of the optional parts you can order, it is not die cast, it’s actually 3D printed:

It blocks the cars’ front cup holders though and doesn’t offer much storage space. So I got it for looks mostly.

What I haven’t made photos of yet are two more upgrades I got, so here I went with pictures from the Internet (too lazy to go take my own, heh):

 

The default shroud of the gear selector (Renault calls it “e-Pop shifter”, because marketing) is just black. This one I got here is an optional part called the “numbeR5” shifter. Supposedly this thing is meant to resemble a lipstick. I wouldn’t have seen it as such if I weren’t told so, but there you go. There are more versions of this, e.g. one with a French flag. You can find them all in [Renaults’ options brochure]. The cushion is a Chinese 3rd-party memory foam thingy that isn’t too high quality. But I wanted to have cupholders after all plus a comfier centre console.

The cupholders of the cushion are cheaply attached using velcro strips, but they’re neatly positioned, because with this solution, both passengers in the front and in the rear can use them. One could also keep the cupholders in the centre console as they are, which would give all passengers their own individual cupholders. The red colour could’ve been a bit flashier, but okay. Also the bags on the side are pretty limited and can maybe be used to hold few coins, but not much more. You can find that thing on [Amazon].

3. Reasoning and some upsides

And now, for my reasons for going electric and also as to why I got this particular car:

• The cheap Dacia Duster had started breaking apart after just 80,000 km, so I had to do something.
• It’s electric and I was curious about the new tech and its properties, plus I wanted to stop burning fossil fuel anyway.
• A lot of instant torque, which is fun.
• A large part of the car (the fabrics and plastics, mostly) are made from recycled bottles, which I absolutely welcome!
• Aside from the entertainment system and its TSMC-made chips and I guess displays, literally everything in this car is made in France and not in China! Even the engine! Since August 2025 this holds true even for the battery! That’s a massive plus!
• Most parts are even made within a 300 km radius, which reduces logistics costs and further reduces overall exhaust fume production.
• No smells of burnt fuel or oil inside of the car (had that a lot in my Passat), runs very quiet and you can feel no engine vibration at all. Some people dislike this, but I love it.
• Renault plans to source its Lithium from within the EU by the end of 2026, which I like as well. Currently, the Lithium for the batteries is still sourced in China as far as I know.
• It’s got that cool 5-step charge indicator made of an illuminated “5” on the bonnet, making it asymmetrical!
• The battery should last for about 5,000 charging cycles. For me that means 96 freaking years! The car will be a pile of rust long before the battery will die.
• Also, this Renault battery has an emergency fire extinguishing system built into the cells. Gives you a feeling of additional safety. Update 2025-11-06: This is only meant for the fire brigade to be able to extinguish batteries on fire. So it’s not an automatic system or anything like that, it’s basically just a hatch that gives them a way to connect a hose or something like that.
• It has a configurable “safety perso” mode that’s just a double-click of a button away! Turns off all the beeping when driving e.g. 32 km/h in a zone with a speed limit of 30, etc.
• I mostly drive short distances, so charging should not be an issue (will try long distances as well though).
• Supposedly lower total cost of ownership with time, as electrical energy is cheaper than petrol and Diesel per km.
• My “big” (*cough*…) version comes with a mass of 1,45 tonnes, which is really not much for a BEV! Nothing like the 2+ tonne heavyweights.
• Pretty sporty, premium multi-link independent wheel suspension for all four wheels which is supposedly very unusual for cars in this class and price segment.
• Finally, I just absolutely love the looks of this car, it’s just a joy to look at it, adorable whether outside or inside! And it’s got a lot of little easter eggs to discover over time. Plus, I love the yellow / red / black colour combination, exactly my thing with those optional red stripes and “5” logo on the roof!

It’s insane that even the automotive chips (for which we don’t need advanced process nodes) are made by ST Microelectronics right here in Europe! That’s the guys who used to manufacture those PowerVR chips for Kyro and Kyro 2 graphics cards a long time ago, and they have a factory in France and a few more elsewhere in Europe. The chips are probably made on a 28 nanometres process node I presume.

As mentioned, the multimedia system is based on Taiwanese chips and I suppose display panels. Yeah okay, we have two AIs installed, an ARM processor, DRAM and flash built in, etc. We don’t have the factories for those chips in Europe yet, and we probably won’t for a long while to come, so that’s a small minus. Nothing anyone can do about that however. The software being Google Android Automotive also means that this part comes from the USA, not Europe.

What I got is the “Iconic Five” top end model, and with all the additional extras it cost me ≈34,450€. Sure, you can get many combustion engine cars for significantly less, but this price? For a product almost entirely manufactured in a European country? What the heck, count me in! Even though it took me about 10 years of saving up, I now had just enough money to cover that expense. Plus, it’s a leasing contract anyway, but I still insisted on theoretically being able to pay for it all in one shot. It’s just a tic of mine never to buy nor lease something that I don’t have the full amount of cash for.

Just out of curiosity I attempted to configure a Volkswagen Golf in a way that resembles my R5 configuration as closely as possible and that car ended up with a price of ≈33,420€. Sure, there’ll be some discounts at the dealerships, so maybe you can get it for ≈30,000 – 31,000 € or something. It’d be cheaper, but not by all that much.

4. Downsides

Let’s look at the downsides that come to mind in regards to BEVs and this specific car, at least in my opinion after more than half a year of it having become my daily driver:

• Range, naturally. This is to be expected. In summer, it’s easy to reach over 300 km per charge starting with 80%, in winter this may drop below 200 km in worst case scenarios at sub-zero temperatures in °C.
• With 100 kW DC, it charges from 20% – 80% in 30 minutes. With just 11 kW AC though (the most it can do on AC), it’s multiple hours. That’s okay, but of course, it’s not petrol / Diesel refueling speed, obviously.
• Not everybody actually likes how quiet and vibration-free a BEV runs, even though I do.
• Its Li-On NMC battery is pretty sensitive to environmental temperature. Runs at ~10 – 13 kWh/100 km for me in the summer, but skyrockets to 22 – 28 kWh/100 km when temperatures drop below 5°C. So its range isn’t good in cold climates. Preconditioning is important here to preheat the battery!
• The car isn’t very aerodynamic. Renault sacrificed efficiency for style here. While I agree with that decision, it does have its drawbacks: Less range, especially on highways.
• It’s limited to a maximum speed of 150 km/h. Doesn’t matter in my case, I mostly don’t go faster than 100 km/h, but this might bother some people, especially in countries with high or no speed limits on highways (e.g. Germany).
• The multimedia system – it’s based on Google Android Automotive – is snappy and works pretty well, but there are minor bugs, such as the radio remaining silent in rare cases when powering up the car. Switching the input source back and forth fixes this, but yeah, it’s not entirely bug-free.
• It’s boot isn’t all too large and it’s got no frunk either. Plus, you can have large people (say 1,90 metres or so) sit in the front and in the back, but it’ll be really uncomfortable for passengers on the back seats. With 2 × 1,75 metres it works, as long as the front seats aren’t lowered down too much, so people can still put their feet under the front seats.
• No one-pedal driving yet. Should come with future revisions, or so Renault claims.
• It features four steering column levers. A light control lever on the left, and the gear selector, wiper and media system levers on the right. A lot of people don’t like that setup. I totally don’t mind it though and adapted to them really quickly.
• The basic rear-view camera (not the 360° version) has a really low resolution, feels like a webcam from the year 2000 or something. I mean, it does what it’s supposed to do, but a few more pixels would be nice.
• Renault’s “Reno” AI assistant is… ugh, well, let’s just say I disabled it permanently after it started nagging me to set it up with the setup procedure never working.

I myself don’t mind the AC charging time, because my employer has AC chargers right in front of the building I’m working in. No-brainer. The energy ain’t free, but at 28 ¢/kWh it’s reasonably priced. For the full 52 kWh that’d result in 14.56€, much less than filling up a petrol- or Diesel-powered car. Right now, where I live, 40 litres of petrol or Diesel would cost around 60€ after all. Sure, you cover way more distance with that, but for that money I can fully charge the R5 over 4 times, which would result in an overall, realistic range of 1200 km for the same money! So the R5 is cheaper per km.

Let’s compare it to a rather extreme Diesel-powered car, my old VW passat, that I even managed to push well beyond 1000 kilometres of range. Under optimal weather conditions, I managed to push it down to 4.5 L/100 km. At current prices, that’d be 6.75 €/100 km.

Let’s assume 12 kWh/100 km for the R5: 12 kWh × 28 ¢ = 336 ¢ or 3.36 €/100 km. Even in icy winter conditions, where you’d end up with ≈20 kWh/100 km, it’d cost you 5.60€ / 100 km, still less than the very best efficieny which that old turbo diesel could deliver in terms of distance per money. And you’d save a bit more even, no engine oil required, and supposedly lower maintenance cost (though I’ll only really know after a few years will have passed).

Let’s assume a lifetime of 10 years. With my typical kilometrage of 10,000 km/year, that would mean (very rough estimate) about 6,750 € for the Diesel fuel of my Passat if I could drive it under optimal conditions all the time. For the R5, that’d be 3,360 €, so 3,390 € cheaper over 10 years. But please take that with a grain of salt, just to get some kind of idea. I didn’t even include inflation prognoses or additional costs here, just fuel versus electricity at current prices.

But even without the chargers of my employer, I could just charge while doing my weekly grocery shopping, as there are more than enough supermarkets around here that provide fast chargers. And they are mostly just sitting there, unused. I guess most people who drive BEVs nowadays have houses with photovoltaics and a wallbox installed (I don’t own a house). The adoption of BEVs by people who aren’t wealthier home owners seems to be beginning only about now. In any case, at least around here the required infrastructure is definitely there.

5. Manufacturing

Here are some renderings of the battery packs. I couldn’t find any actual photos of it, so yeah. Both were provided by Renault, but I assume the version on the right is likely to be closer to the real thing:

 

It’s a Lithium-Ion NMC (Nickel, Manganese, Cobalt) battery, so it still relies on some problematic materials, especially considering what Lithium mines look like today and what they do to the environment. Also, Cobalt and Nickel mining processes are supposedly pretty bad as well. I mentioned that Renault is planning to source the Lithium from within the EU soon, where they will have to stick to our much stricter environmental regulations, but I have to admit I don’t know about the other raw materials for the batteries.

Also, right off the assembly line, your typical BEV will have allegedly produced more CO₂ than a combustion engine car. Does this still hold true for the Renault 5? I asked the [French version of our great machine gods], and it claimed that it’s likely producing less than any combustion car made in China. But it wasn’t perfectly certain, it just based that on the information that Renault has invested a lot in reducing the CO₂ footprint of its factories.

What I heard is, that you’d have to ride your BEV for about 10,000 – 20,000 km to break even in comparison to a combustion engine car of the same class when it comes to overall CO₂ production. But if what “Le Chat” claims holds true, then you’d actually have saved some when having the car made for you already. But that’s info provided by a French AI about a French factory building French cars, so take that with a grain of salt.

But after like 20,000 km you just keep going without producing any CO₂ for the rest of the vehicle’s lifetime. Also no [CO], no [NO_x], no [benzene], no [CH₂O], no [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons] and no soot, either. Less acidic rain, less cancer, less greenhouse effect (even though it’ll take decades to make an impact) and so on and so forth.

Sure, a single car doesn’t make a noticable difference, but still.

6. Driving the Renault 5 E-Tech

So how does the Renault 5 feel?

It’s pure fun! Some people even call it a slight “go-kart” feeling.

Granted, the steering wheel could put up more resistance, but the suspension is absolutely awesome and feels great. So do the seats and most of the mechanical buttons. Also, I configured the car with the higher-end Harman/Kardon audio system with a subwoofer under the boot, and boy… I will never ever cheap out on a car’s audio setup again!

I had to set it up a little using the audio mixer, because the basslines were eating up my mids, but a 20 – 30% reduction of the bass results in something I absolutely love: Clearly defined mids and smooth highs with no harshness with the lowest of the audible spectrum being specifically emphasised. I mean that part that you almost feel more than hear. Not many songs cover that very deep part of the audible spectrum, but those that do feel really wonderful with this setup! The frequency curve reminds me a little bit of my Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro headphones, even if that sounds like a strange comparison. So, very deep bass is really intense without eating up any other parts of a song, awesome!

Does it lack anything? Yes. I thought I wouldn’t need that 360° camera, assuming the simple rear-view one would suffice. But when I saw that the 360° camera actually has its images processed into a bird-view one with a model of the actual car (in its actual configuration with decals and all!) rendered into the picture, I regretted my decision quite a bit. That would’ve been many times better than my simple rear-view camera.

Also, there still are quite a few spots where it’s just hard plastic. With some surface structure to make it feel a bit better, but still. At least Renault was smart about it: Almost every spot you actually do touch on a regular basis feels high quality! Mh… minus the gear shift lever, maybe.

Almost final words: You can see that my reasoning here is mostly driven by emotion and ideology rather than practicality, and some of you might not like that all that much (going for BEV because climate-friendly, going for “Europe first” for geopolitical reasons, etc.), but that’s my current approach. Also: I could’ve taken better and more photos, my apologies for that. Laziness struck again! 

In any case, more passion that tool this time around.