Renault Ondelios - Paris motor show news - 2008

If there's one dominant theme at the Paris show, that theme is hybrid. We've seen plenty of near-production hybrids - the Peugeot Prologue, for example - and actual-production hybrids - like the Honda Insight - but here's a proper high concept effort from Renault.

It's called the Ondelios, and it's an outlandish vision of what a six-seater tourer might look like in the future. The bizarre shape, says Renault, is all about aerodynamics - the Ondelios has a drag coefficient of just 0.29.

That bizarre rear end is the result of minimising drag without compromising headroom in the rearmost row of seats. It does look rather like an alien giving birth though, doesn't it?

The Ondelios is powered by a two-litre turbodiesel supported by two electric motors, good for a 0-62 time of just under eight seconds and CO2 emissions of just 120g/km.

All very nice, but we were rather hoping the future would look more like - well, more like a cross between the Lambo Estoque and the Peugeot RC. Is that too much to ask?