I want to tell you a story about Renault, or "Renoh," or
"Renawlt," or however you say it where you come from.
Renault has always been best known as a maker of
affordable, interesting cars.
But about four years ago, the world changed for Renault.
It came under enormous pressure from emerging Korean
manufacturers and the unstoppable
efficiency of the VW group.
Sales struggled, and it needed to redefine itself.
Tapping into the demand for increased efficiency, it
hedged its bets on electric power.
And in 2009 Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn said, we're putting our
chips, and we're putting our investment, and we're putting
our efforts behind this belief that now is the time.
So now is the time.
This is the new Renault Twizy, with it's 17-horsepower
electric motor weighing 465 kilograms and, wait for it,
capable of 0 to 28 miles an hour in 6.1 seconds.
Firing up the Twizy is not an ordinary exercise.
You put on this belt here, then you have a fourth point
belt that comes over like that.
It just feels like you're not actually ready to go anywhere.
Then you take your key, which looks just like a sort of Clio
key, but it's got nothing on it.
No markings at all.
All the sci-fi outside, and you get a rather
ordinary-looking key.
You plug it in the hole, like this, and you turn it around.
Your dashboard lights up and tells you that you've got a
bit of battery left.
You then press D for drive.
You try and undo the rather awkward hand brake.
And then there's no noise.
Oh, a beep saying, go.
And that's it.
Completely silent.
It is, by any stretch, very strange.
Then you just pull away with so little noise, the whole
thing seems a bit bizarre.
OK, start from the top.
It's not very fast.
0 to 28 miles an hour in 6.1 seconds might sound
impressive, and it does kind of get going, but by the time
you reach about 35 miles an hour, 40 miles an hour, it
doesn't really want to accelerate an awful lot more.
That doesn't worry me, though.
I can now understand why they've launched this car in a
[INAUDIBLE]
because it's going to hoover up car sales or scooter sales
in the Mediterranean holiday destinations.
It's perfect for here.
I'm open-sided.
I can smell these wonderful whatever-they-are, eucalypt,
or conifers outside.
I can smell the island.
It's just very, very pleasant knocking
along inside this car.
Unexpected things about the Twizy.
It's got masses of grip.
It's only got those skinny little tires, but good lord.
I keep finding myself thinking--
can I go flat out around this corner.
It's a classic [INAUDIBLE] car in that respect.
You get in and you want to just see how fast
you can go in it.
I would say that it's not going to increase the
frequency of crashes in holiday
destinations by teenagers.
But it's probably just going to cause slightly different
types of accidents, that's all.
The steering is unassisted and light and actually, really
rather nice.
The front end wants to push a bit.
They've obviously had to put some understeering in the car
to make sure that I don't go out and do massive skids.
Although we did try.
Watch this.
Right?
These roads are very smooth, and it feels quite busy to me.
So I suspect it could be quite rough on a coarse UK road.
But let's get to the crux of this, guys.
Who is going to buy one of these are live in a rural
environment?
They just aren't.
This is a car, I think, with two purposes.
One, the rental market, as I've said, in Europe in hot
destinations nations.
And also, center of town.
And to all you people in America watching this, you
have to understand that a lot of we strange Europeans live
in crowded towns.
And there's so much congestion that you can't get anywhere.
And the cost of fuel is ridiculous.
So the idea of something that you can just plug in and
charge and then knock around town for an hour or so and
then come back again, that's quite appealing.
OK, the claimed range of this car, best case scenario, is
about 60 miles, 100 kilometers or so.
When you get in it, it displays about 50 or 60
kilometers range.
If you then stay around town and drive it at its worst,
least efficient, let's say, with no regenerative breaking
at all, it will stay at around that mark.
If you then drive the thing absolutely flat out, you'll
probably get about 30 miles from a battery charge.
However, if you're out on the road using the braking,
staying off the throttle, coasting down hills-- that's a
fun bit, that is, because you find yourself doing massive
late-breaking maneuvers into tighter turns, hanging on,
hanging on, hanging on so that you can get as much
regenerative force into it as possible.
If you're doing that, well, you can eke the thing out
quite a lot.
And it's quite fun hanging onto the range meter and
seeing how much you can squeeze from it.
As for charging, well, in the UK, if you live in the UK and
you plug this thing in do you know what?
[INAUDIBLE]
it's going to take you 12 hours to get your next 60
miles out of it.
So really, you need to be involved in a shortish commute
to make the things work on a daily basis.
There are two downsides to not having any internal combustion
engine noise, then.
First of all, unlike the last electric car I drove, which
was, I think, the Tesla, this has got quite a
lot of gearbox noise.
Ready?
It sorts of whines and does sound like a golf buggy.
That's not the nicest noise, OK.
The other downside is that, when you're mooching around
town and driving slowly, as you do quite a lot in the
Twizy, you hear all the other crud that comes with a car
that you don't want.
If you pick a stone up, it just goes [RHYTHMIC TAPPING].
If you just brake, the caliper might grab a
disc a bit too long.
And it just sort of goes [GRATING SOUND].
You just get these nasty noises.
And the Twizy, to me, is a bit of a collection of slightly
nasty noises.
It's sort of fingernails down blackboard and all
that sort of stuff.
It's not that pleasant.
But there's no doubting that it's quite a
joyful little thing.
I personally feel that you can't watch more than a few
minutes of this.
I can tell you how good it is.
But you can't listen to that bloody whining noise for too
long, can you?
So do you know what?
Renault makes some other very exciting cars.
So thank you for sitting through the Twizy.
Well done, Twizy.
You're more than good enough for what you want to do, and
you're quite funky.
But Renault make much more exciting cars, like this one.
You know, when it comes to Renault, I
quite like the present.
The Twizy may be a glimpse of the future, but the current
clear Renault Sport 200, with a cup chassis that I'm driving
at the moment, is one of the great small, fast cars.
It's just awesome.
And I have to say if I've got to start doing videos on
electric cars, every single video's got to have some
action with something like this in it.
Because it is just an absolute riot.
It's got an RS badge on the front, and it fully, fully
deserves it.
It's just a lightweight, very focused hatchback.
It's got a beam axle at the back, so it's not the last
word in sophistication, but just--
it just absolutely cuts to the essence of what fun
driving is all about.
200 horsepower, under 1300 kilograms.
You have to rev it.
You have to rev, and rev, and rev. You just row this little
lever around.
You keep thinking, it can't rev anymore.
And it does.
[INAUDIBLE]
it's a bit coarse, but it gets the job done.
There's quite a lot to celebrate about the Twizy.
I'll give you that.
It's an electric vehicle.
It has much, much lower emissions than this car.
Electric cars are, whether we like it or not,
a part of our future.
But it's completely a-emotional.
And you only remind yourself just how a-emotional the car
is by driving something like this.
This is a proper little European hothead.
It's the kind of car that I was brought up on.
It's the kind of car that I feel very passionate about.
Because it provides a relatively affordable entry
point to having fun in cars, to learning how to drive cars,
understanding them.
But I'm not sure that these electric
vehicles can offer that.
I'm not sure that the electric vehicle really
offers that as a future.
It's completely noiseless.
This car's just puffing away behind me.
The exhaust is making noise.
I'm in control of it.
OK, it's not that efficient, but it doesn't feel like I'm
really, really ruining the world from here.
It feels like I'm being quite responsible.
Well, for [INAUDIBLE].
So from a media perspective, yeah.
The Twizy's slightly put the writing on the wall for me.
If I've got to test electric cars and generate exciting
content for you guys to watch, how the hell do I do it if the
thing makes no noise and doesn't do much?
I'm kind of out of a job.
If anyone's got any ideas out there, can you write to me on
Twitter, @MikeyHarris, or leave a comment on this video
because I'm a bit worried.
But it does mean that, in the meantime, I'm going to enjoy
doing this for as long as I can.