Renault Austral review

Now that Renault has dropped its four-wheel steering system on UK cars, the main point of interest here is undoubtedly the hybrid system. We explained it briefly on the Overview page, so now for how it feels…

Mostly, it falls into the background. And that’s a complement. On light throttle the engine starts and stops far more often than you realise unless you're looking at the power flow dash graphic. In town it’s generally pretty quiet and is very smooth.

A good dose of full throttle – up a motorway slip road or passing the derestriction sign, say – also feels mostly natural. Engine revs rise through a gear then drop on an upshift. The 0-62mph is a respectable 8.4 seconds, and while the little three-cylinder can murmur on the louder side, it’s not an unpleasant sound.

Does anything confuse it?

Only when you ask for power suddenly does it get into a muddle, pausing while it rearranges the sources and ratios, then clunking slightly as it forges ahead. You do have steering column paddles, but they affect only the degree of lift-off regeneration, not the acceleration gear.

Overall though, it feels as natural as any hybrid. And the quietness and rated economy are excellent. But of course, rated economy largely relates to mixed-speed driving. Again like any hybrid, on a steady-speed motorway where there's not much chance to recover energy, economy falls short of a diesel.

So how economical is it exactly?

Compared to Renault’s claimed 58.9mpg, we saw 52.3mpg on a 75ish-mile round route around the outskirts of London. A fair bit of that did include some proper road test driving, though, so we’re sure you could manage better. Pretty impressive.

Renault tells us there’s up to 30 advanced driver assistance systems including the likes of lane departure warning, blind spot warning and lane keep assist, which we found worked smoothly without being too overbearing. And – so important, this – you can set up the ones you want and those you don’t want, before activating those settings each time you start the car with just two presses of a single button. Nice.

Is it comfortable?

Surprisingly, the Austral does actually handle quite well for a big crossover, even with the cheaper torsion beam rear suspension setup that we’re now limited to in the UK. It corners without too much body roll and controls its weight well, although the steering is overly light unless you knock it up to Sport mode.

Unfortunately, this does seem to have had an adverse effect on the ride. It’s too firm and crashes over even smaller bumps in the road, particularly if you’ve specced the large 20in wheels. Plenty of road noise at motorway speeds, too. Renault claims that changes during its facelift made the Austral more comfortable, but we certainly didn’t find it all that relaxing on UK roads.