It was nicknamed the “Minimax” for minimum space,
maximum… minimum space, maximum size! No, that's the Nissan Juke.
I thought I’d start with a blooper just because well why not and this if you're
wondering what the heck this is, this is the Optional Extra video for the for the main
Renault Scénic video, and I’ll put a link above. So, as I allude to in my blooper, there's not a
lot of love for the Nissan Juke. Certainly not in the comments section of my videos,
and to be honest not a lot from me either. I hired one once and I dubbed it
the “reverse Tardis” because it was smaller on the inside than it was on the outside!
I just don't really get it. Yeah. It didn't really work for us certainly anyway.
One of the perks of this channel is to be able to interview designers. People who've been part of
the production process of cars and to be able to pepper them with all kinds of questions,
and so it's been really nice to be able to talk to Patrick le Quément both for the Twingo which was
honestly one of my favourite cars ever, the Renault Sport Spider, and now of course the
Renault Scénic. He actually was very nice to give me two chats. First of all, he said well
we'll just do a video chat and I’ll just bring you up to speed on the on the whole project, which was
fantastic. So, I could just ask him whatever questions I liked. And then we did a separate
video chat which was the formal interview when I actually knew what I was talking about!
He reminded me of one thing when he was talking about
people kids getting in the back seat and waiting for hours so that they didn't get the middle seat.
And he said his wife didn't want to get in the back of a 2CV when she was young because there's
this piece of metal going down the middle of the of the back seat of a 2CV. And there is,
because I got stuck like a mug! Two French kids got on the other sides in the back of the 2CV and
of course stuck me in the middle because I didn't know any difference. And yeah, it's a very painful
thing. It's having this sort of big metal thing going down the middle of the seat. Not very good.
So, I mentioned that Renault's range bought people in to see the Renault Mégane Scénic in 1996. But
of course the opposite was true as well. The new Mégane Scénic, which was winning all these awards
brought people into the showroom where they would see the 1990 Clio which again they produced,
and the Twingo after that, and now the Mégane in 1995, and the Laguna was coming out.
And so all these cars that Renault were producing… sort of hit after hit after hit. And of course
it was helping just to create a great virtuous cycle for them. And of course using the Mégane
name at the start of Renault Mégane Scénic certainly helped boost the Mégane's image
with the much sought after Scénic. So, it's kind of an opposite thing, where
people were saying “There's this Mégane Scénic” “Oh there's this other thing called the Mégane”
“Oh that's a good car”. And then they produced the open top version. They had
a saloon version come out. So, it was a great virtuous circle as I mentioned.
So, the more I look through the Nissan and Renault history of the 1990s, and I’ve been doing a few
videos about Renault in this period, and of course I’ve just done the Nissan Qashqai.
I see it as really a period of intense change. They start with the Renault 19 which isn't doing
very well, and they think “Well, we haven't got much money so let's reuse the chassis
for the Renault Mégane”, which isn't that unheard of. Essentially just putting a new body on it, a
new interior. But then they realised “Okay we can take that same chassis and we can make a saloon
version. We can make an open top version. We can make them Mégane Scénic. We can make another
version.” And then they're starting to create more and more different variants on the same chassis,
and with Patrick also working with the Delta Group to focus on the bottom line and to really focus on
cost reduction, of cost reduction, of production cost, everywhere that they
can see to reduce cost so that they actually make money on each car - what a crazy concept!
They start reusing so much more, and then of course Carlos Gsohn enters the picture. He's
around certainly in Renault in the late 1990s. Moves to Nissan when Renault acquire Nissan, or
they do this sort of merger share swap thing that they do with Nissan. And Carlos Gsohn goes over
there and just brings those Renault principles of “We need to save cost here, everywhere. We can and
make sure that every car's making a profit.” And then of course he
comes back to Renault and then of course there's this period in the late 2000s where Renault
maybe go a little bit too far and just focus on cost, and they're not really focusing on design.
And so talking about design. This whole video really is talking about “Does
extraordinary design matter?”. So, there's one thing… you know it helps that I’m interviewing
Patrick, and Patrick is very much in the camp of creating extraordinary design. He created the
Ford Sierra of course, and then of course all these crazy cars in the 1990s and the
Vel Satis concept and things like that. Today's cars are bland, but they sell.
But you look at think cars like the Twingo, the Mégane, the Scénic. They sold very well,
and a large part of that probably is down to the design of them. Certainly, the Twingo that
wouldn't have sold so well if it hadn't been for such sort of cute look, and that sort of
interesting design that they have. And of course a great price because of the fact that they're
reducing costs and being able to produce cars for a reasonable price, and actually make a profit.
But is there an opening today for extraordinary design? You look at cars today and a lot of them
just follow the same design. That's not to say they aren't interesting, but they're all very much
the same. There are exceptions. You look at things like the Nissan Cube, cars like that.
But most cars are generally pretty similar. And I made a video about it saying modern cars so
boring. Or does it really matter? And yeah at the end of the day this video is sort of opening that
question and saying does it matter? Does it not matter? It's really up to you to decide.
So anyway, the Scénic may be over, or it may not be over, but many of the elements from the Renault
Scénic have been taken over to other cars. Cup holders, more storage bins, foldable and removable
rear seats, elements like this have been taken over and cars today are a lot more practical in
their interiors than they were before the Renault Scénic. So particularly crossovers - they have a
lot of similarities today with the MPVs of old. They look a little bit different, they're a little
bit more cool, but they're essentially MPVs. There's a lot of similarity between the two. So,
the name MPV might be over because it was sort of seen as rather dull and boring, but the ideas from
the Renault Scénic and other MPVs that followed, the third row of seats, those ideas have lived on.
It's a shame to me though that the fun element of the original... certainly the Scénic concept,
and the Scénic in 1996. The fun elements of those seem to have died.
I love the idea of the imaginary world carpet and I’ve spent hours looking into patterns and reading
more into it than ever was there before. And you can imagine on these long boring car journeys that
you just sort of stare at this carpet or stare at elements of the car and just let your imagination
run wild. Whereas now particularly you look at the latest Scénics, it's just this big sea of
black. And there's obviously practical reasons why we have this sea of black, because it's
practical. You can wipe seats down easily. They don't show stains. And there's a lot of
good practical reasons, but I do feel that we've just lost something and having exciting cars that
have some character to them would be quite nice anyway. Of course you noticed at the end of the
video I had a quote from David Twohig, and the reason I did that was because I was interviewing
him about the Nissan Qashqai. But the same time I was starting work on the Renault Scénic script,
and also starting to interview Patrick. So because of that I asked him to do a
quote about the Renault Scénic which was very nice of him to do that. But there was
a longer quote where he talks a little bit more about it, so I’ll insert that here now.
“So I think the impact of the Mégane's Scénic really can't be underestimated because first of
all it was the vehicle I would say that provided the cash resources that Renault required to
invest in buy and rescue Nissan effectively. It had been a massive commercial success. So
I actually think it's not an exaggeration to say that the Alliance would not have happened
without the Mégane Scénic because it was the treasury that allowed the Alliance to be created.
It had been a big impact on Nissan before the Alliance. We had tried,
and I speak as a Nissan person at the time, we had tried to kind of do our own
against Scénic in the Almera Tino based on the Almera hatchback and built in the Barcelona
plant. But frankly speaking that vehicle was not a success, and it did not attract…
it simply did not succeed as the Mégane Scénic had. After the Alliance of course this was still
an opportunity for us, and as we've described in a separate conversation Nissan considered
doing a vehicle that was somewhere between a conventional hatchback and something like
the Mégane Scénic. That vehicle never saw the light of day it was called named B32A,
and finally it was that design process and studying that potential vehicle that led Nissan
onto the affordable crossover segment. And the vehicle that would go on to become Qashqai. So,
in a rather indirect way I think there are some links between the success of the Mégane Scénic
and the great eventual success for Nissan of the Nissan Qashqai.”
Well thanks very much for watching this Optional Extra video. If there's some other videos if you
want to watch those. Thanks for watching the main video and I’ll see you in the next video!