A forgotten Renault project?

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Whether you call the Renault 5 a classic or not: it has now been more than fifty years since it made its debut. This cheeky little hatchback set the tone for a generation of French superminis — cars that were just a bit larger and roomier than the classic designs of Issigonis.

But was the R5 really meant to appear in this slightly inflated format? An article in Elsevier dated August 9, 1969, suggests otherwise: it announced that Renault planned to launch an even smaller model in 1970 — the ‘Renault 2’. According to the report, this car would be about as compact as the British Mini, accompanied by a sketch that clearly hinted at the later R5, though in a smaller package.

Strikingly, there is no trace of such an ‘R2’ in today’s Renault literature. Was the ‘R2’ intended to slot below the later R5? Or did the author simply get it wrong — and did the proposed ‘R2’ eventually become, more than two years later, the Renault 5 (better known to some as “Le Car”)?

Text: Jeroen Booij — Illustration reproduced with permission from Rudolf Das

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