Vive La Renaulution: what makes the Renault 4 our 2025 EV of the year?

Top Gear

01-07-2025

Renault did a magnificent job with its revival of the 5 hatchback... turns out it was just getting warmed up
Dateline Morocco, sometime in the mid 1990s. A white Renault 4 is ascending the 2,200m Tizi n'Tichka pass over the Atlas, gateway to the Sahara. I'm taking liberties with the primitive engine and brakes, using short straights between the hairpins for sneaky overtakes of all the other white Renault 4s. 'It's like being on a car launch,' says my passenger, who knows the things we young and stupid road testers got up to when let loose in a fleet of identical new cars. But these aren't new. They're bashed up renters. For many years, the white Renault 4 was the standard issue cheap hire car in Marrakech.
For decades that original R4, launched in 1961, did faithful service on many other thankless tasks in French-influenced parts of the world. It was cheap, versatile – the world's first hatchback – simple, tough and utterly unpretentious. Renault sold a staggering 8.1 million. Yet most us have forgotten how successful the 4 was, doubtless because they've mostly decomposed now, much like our memory of them. So the new one has to stand on its own four wheels, rather than bask in reflected glory.
Especially as in spirit this new 4 isn't a 4 at all. Not because it is electric, but because it isn't especially cheap. If you want a modern Renault 4, a car designed with a gimlet eye to every conceivable means of saving a centime, Renault will soon have one. The electric Twingo.
Photography: Huckleberry Mountain
That first 4 was a crossover decades before crossovers became a thing. If you want to find a survivor these days, go find an apparently deserted French farm at the top of a rough steep track. So Renault is being eminently sensible in selling the new 4 that way. As a crossover for the small family, it's nicely sized, with an extra 80mm in the wheelbase versus the new 5.
So, provided the driver raises their seat a little, there's enough room for the extremities (toes, kneecaps, scalps) of an adult behind them. The boot is a deep 420 litres and the front passenger seat folds forward to take your DIY planks or cello. A section of the bumper lifts with the tailgate, deepening the aperture. It'll even tow a 750kg trailer. The R4 is just 1.8m across the body, and feels handy down narrow streets and lanes.
It hardly takes an automotive Inspector Clouseau to figure out this car is a close relative of today's R5. Indeed pretty well everything under the bodywork is the same, except for the longer wheelbase, 50kg of extra weight – still very light for an EV this size – and slightly recalibrated springs and steering. So that brings a 148bhp motor and 52kWh battery in all UK specs. Renault's excellent screen and control system is here, with its satisfyingly abundant physical controls.
On the outside through, it's wholly other. It repeatedly riffs off the OG 1961 ancestor. For those keeping score... The face was once a single chromed frame with the round lamps at the end and grille in the middle, now the chrome is substituted by an LED perimeter track. A cut line between this and the wings follows a gap between the original's wings and forward opening bonnet/grille assembly. On the sides, tall and flattish, you've ridged door panels, like the R4 GTL had. The reverse raked rear door window and trapezoid rearmost side window keep the faith with the characteristic rhythm of the old car's fenestration. An upright tailgate and tall narrow little lamp clusters complete the picture.