Renault 4 review

It doesn't drive quite like the Renault 5, but its character is similar. The suspension is a little calmer than the 5's, is all. The steering remains quickish and accurate, working in harmony with the suspension to feed you smoothly into and through a bend.

At first acquaintance that steering feels remote, but push the cornering effort harder and sensory messages start to come up from the tyres. Messages of the sophisticated multi-link rear suspension keeping everything nicely precise and balanced front to rear. It serves you with a smile.

In town or on tight rural lanes, you might want to set up a personal drive mode that softens the initial accelerator response. That makes it smoother to drive in traffic. It also lets you meter out the torque gently from a corner, and avoid wheelspin. The car we tested, leaning into the crossover business, had optional Goodyear all-season tyres that don't have huge traction on dry roads.

Is it comfy?

Not unexpectedly, that firm-ish setup translates into a fairly busy ride. But it's not harsh, and shrugs off biggish bumps and dips without concern. The tyres and suspension are also quiet, which helps you ignore the road-level perturbations. And bumps don't knock you off line. You just point and steer.

Power is more than enough for suburbs and B-roads, but it tails away a bit at motorway speed. The 0-62mph time of 8.5 seconds is the sort of thing that'd be considered lively in a sub-£30k petrol family car. There's no particular need for an EV to be quicker, despite the headline-grabbing and stomach-punching acceleration of certain twin-motor electric crossovers.

The brakes are pretty sensitive at low speed. But in solid stops they're reassuring and consistent.

The R4 is just 1.8 metres across the body and under 4.2m long, and sure enough feels handy when threading down narrow streets and lanes. It'll even tow a 750kg trailer.

What about driver assist?

The Techno spec comes with full adaptive cruise control with lane centring. The base Evolution spec is standard cruise, and just a lane-departure warning system. Both are pretty well calibrated.

Anyway, the R4 has a hardware switch for the driver-assist. Double-press it and you get your preferred setup. So you select that preferred setup just the once, never to return to the screen menu.