You can now drive Renault's strangest ever people carrier in Gran Turismo 7

Gran Turismo 7. A racing sandbox where you can perform driving feats that neither your talent, bravery nor insurer would let you attempt in the real world. It’s a series that’s always featured a peculiar combination of mouthwateringly rare racing cars, exotic luxury models and prosaic hatchbacks that your dad would pick out of a dealership forecourt. And here to uphold that fine tradition is update 1.62.

GT7’s latest update adds four new cars to the fold: the 2026 Afeela 1 Signature (that's Sony's upcoming electric saloon), the 2025 Chevrolet Corvette CX Concept, the Chevrolet Corvette CX.R Vision Gran Turismo, and – drumroll please – a 2002 Renault Avantime. 

Pitched somewhere between ‘high performance luxury’ and ‘I need to go and do the big shop and then pick up the kids from football’, the Avantime featured a preposterous 3.0-litre V6 engine packed into an MPV chassis. Renault sold about 8,500 units between 2001 and 2003, making the Avantime quite the rare specimen. 

We love Gran Turismo games for including cars like this. It’s so much more interesting to hotlap and apply new paint jobs to a weird V6 Espace thingy than it is to tick off easy victories in homogenised concept vehicles. 

All the new cars added in this 1.62 update get their own new World Circuit events, which can be raced in numerous different cars but are clearly devised with the new models in mind:

• European Sunday Cup 400 at the Circuit de Sainte-Croix (B Reverse)
• Japanese 4WD Challenge 600 at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta
• World Touring Car 900 at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps

There’s also a new Extra Menu Book, No. 47, called "Japanese Racing Pioneers". It’s available to collectors above Café level 33+, requiring the Honda S800 '66, Nissan Skyline GT-R '71 and Toyota 2000GT '67.

New tracks are thinner on the ground for GT7, and the community has noticed. Perhaps circuits will be the focus of subsequent updates. Until then, enjoy an MPV that can load up with everything you needed from B&Q and still do a decent time around the Nordschleife.