Renault 5 - long-term review

The French still love a nippy little city car, and our time with the 5 so far has proved that Renault is still very good at building them. It drives better than it needs to, is supremely comfortable, affordable and pretty efficient too. Worth noting here that the recent cold snap has seen my average efficiency drop to 3.6 miles per kWh, but that’s really not too bad considering this is a mid-spec Techno without heated seats or steering wheel, so I am using the full-blown heater on the regular.

Anyway, even with the optional baguette holder now fitted, I felt that our R5 could feel even more Gallic. So, to facilitate my desired Parisian-on-a-caffeine-high driving style, I decided to see whether it’d be possible to fit the steel wheels that come as standard on base spec cars in the R5’s home market.

We love shiny things in the UK, so we only get a choice between two styles of 18in alloy on our local R5 configurator, but big alloy wheels are notoriously easy to ding and expensive to repair, so they don’t really belong on a city car that’s parallel parked at least twice a day.

The French know this, and over there you can have surprisingly large 18in black steelies no matter which power output/battery size you go for. In the UK we’re also rather snobby about power figures, which explains why we don’t get the smaller 40kWh battery with the entry level 94bhp motor, but we digress.

I’d seen a number of R5s wearing the steel wheels when collecting ‘our’ car at the Douai factory, and thankfully Renault’s UK team was more than happy to indulge my desire to Frenchify the spec of HS74 ECY. The wheels were ordered, and I booked in a date to visit the CEVA Logistics site that looks after the fleet of press cars.

The swap itself was as straightforward as you’d expect with a fresh set of Continental tyres already mounted on the new wheels, although it did reveal that a little surface rust had begun to show on the R5’s hubs. I was very tempted to leave the black steelies exposed as it looks brilliantly base spec, but for now we’ve stuck on the turbofan-style plastic trims that throwback slightly to the wheels on the old 5 Turbo 2. I actually think their design suits this retro remake perfectly and helps the chunky arches to stand out. Plus, London’s width restrictors are no longer the enemy!

Oh, and while we were at the press garage, I also managed to pinch one of the £30 ‘e-pop shifters’ with a fun WT5 graphic to brighten up the awkward-to-use drive selector. It may not always do exactly as it’s told, but at least it now makes me chuckle. I’d expected these to just be stickers that you applied yourself, but they’re actually plastic covers that can be swapped out with a screwdriver or a plastic trim removal tool.

As a rule I try not to get too attached to long-term test cars, but a little bit of personalisation has made me even more fond of the little 5.