Mon dieu! This Renault 5 Turbo 3E is a 500bhp, RWD hot hatch you can buy

Renault’s bringing sexy mid-engined-hot-hatch-heroics back, via the medium of the deliriously-arched Turbo 3E pictured here. It’ll be a proper road car. That you can buy. With money. And outrageous fortune.

Because while today we rightly hail the return of the granddaddy of hot hatchery, it’s actually a) really very expensive, and b) quite limited. But that’s for later.

Let us first add some important context charting the stratospheric progress of Planet Hot Hatch – and Planet Electricity – over the last five decades via two potentially amusing factoids.

The first ever Renault 5 powered solely by electricity was unveiled way back in 1972 with a heady range of… 37 miles. In 1980, the original mid-engined Renault 5 Turbo managed to win hearts and minds with just 156bhp.

Of course, this being the age of overinflation – literally, can’t get enough of those arches – means this brand new electric 5 Turbo needs a soupçon more power than its granddaddy managed. Renault appears to have tipped the entire lot in, because this Turbo 3E – which follows the lairy concept car whose tyre smoke we’re still waving away from 2023 – pumps out an astronomical 500bhp.

Five hundred horsepower. For a small, punchy little Renault city car. That’s delivered via a pair of rear-in-wheel motors – a fairly, well, revolutionary setup that's great for simplifying power transfer and control, but do add unsprung mass – allowing for a 0-62mph time of just 3.5s. Perhaps the engineers inhaled a lungful of burnt rubber, because that’s not just deliriously-fast, that’s – as Renault rightly states – “a time worthy of supercars or even hypercars”.

Renault hasn’t yet specified battery size but does promise a ‘carbon superstructure’ at the new 5 Turbo 3E’s base, allowing both “lightness and maximum rigidity”. Weight? No idea. But the 2023 concept car weighed in at just under 1,500kg; ditto the regular, front-drive production 5 and Alpine A290.

Speaking of the regular new Renault 5, design boss Gilles Vidal told TG that this new twin-motor Turbo 3E production car will take cues from the current R5 EV… while thine own eyes will tell you it’ll also doff its snapback cap to the wild Eighties original. Specifically in the form of those rear-quarter vents, here reincarnated for the electric age.

The silhouette’s unmistakable – squat, squared-off, lairy – but with a raft of new-age touches like those reimagined fog lights, monster wheels, vented bonnet, delicate roof spoiler and not-at-all-delicate rear venturi tunnels.

Vidal said there’d be endless scope for customisation of the new R5 Turbo 3E, with a new internal team being scrambled to cater to buyers’ choice of trim, paint, stickers and so on.

Why not have it as an Alpine, though – is that not the Renault Group’s sportier side? Apparently, even though Alpine now exists as its own entity, it’s perfectly OK for Renault to do ‘wild things’. Nailed that brief, we’d proffer.

“This car is to show EVs can be emotional, not just white appliances,” Vidal told TopGear.com.

Renault hasn’t told TopGear.com exactly how many of these new R5 Turbo 3Es it’ll build, but we’re expecting somewhere in the region of 2,000 (they made over 4,000 of the R5 Turbo 1 and Turbo 2s, and nearly 3,000 Clio V6s, for context), with a price stretching over £100k. No doubt there’ll be a queue of monied hot hatch enthusiasts wearing rose-tinted glasses willing to cough up that much.

Expect to see it in 2026. Mostly sideways.