Renault Symbioz review

It’s largely okay. It steers relatively accurately and controls its weight well through corners. It’s happiest in town – where most of these will spend the majority of their time – thanks to super light steering, although we found the low-speed ride to be particularly harsh with the larger 18in alloys fitted. This isn’t a car that’s comfortable dealing with potholes or speedbumps. Uh oh.

It doesn’t exactly feel sporty once you pick up the pace, either. At motorway speeds the cabin is filled with road and wind noise, so neither is it a great cruiser.

What's the hybrid system like?

Renault says that it taps into its F1 hybrid expertise, and while that’s mostly just marketing guff it’s actually a pretty clever system.

It pairs a 1.8-litre four-cylinder petrol engine with two electric motors (one of which starts the car and gets you going, the other starts up the engine and smooths out the gear changes), a six-speed clutchless gearbox and a 1.4kWh battery.

So, you always start in electric mode, and there’s a surprising amount of electric running to be had in town despite the teeny tiny battery. The transmission has a tendency to hold onto gears for too long as the revs climb though, or as the engine charges the battery, and the rough noise is transmitted straight into the cabin.

Zero to 62mph now takes 9.1 seconds (down 1.5 secs on the previous hybrid setup), but there’s still that second of hesitation when you put your foot down as the transmission makes its mind up and works out whether you require the electric motor or engine.

An ‘E-Save’ button on the dashboard maintains a battery charge of at least 40 per cent, handy when driving on the motorway and you want to save some juice.

And while it may sound a little rough and is slightly ponderous off the line, the hybrid system is genuinely efficient. Over a 200-mile test route that included plenty of motorway miles as well as town and country roads, we saw an average of 58.1mpg vs a claimed 64.2mpg on the WLTP cycle. Not bad at all.

Anything else we should know?

Well, much like other Renault Group products the Symbioz gets a handy ‘My Safety’ switch which allows you to quickly and easily turn off any and every driver assist feature you don’t want. It’s fully customisable too – we had it set up to turn off the speed limit warning and lane keep assist – and saves the pain of delving into the touchscreen like on so many rivals.

At the end of every journey, a driving summary gives you an eco and safety score on a scale of zero to 100, plus advice on how to improve. Will this get irritating after, let's say, a week? Probably.

As ever, you get Renault’s full suite of safety driver aids (we’re told there’s a total of 24), including level 2 autonomous driving, which combines adaptive cruise control with lane centring assist and traffic sign recognition.