Renault Clio TCe 100 review: A French car you might actually want

Good value, fun to drive, safe, spacious and seemingly very well screwed together. Sacre bleu!

Renault Clio TCe 100.

I’ve never owned a French car. I’ve never even wanted to own one. I used to like the Citroën CX enormously, especially the way the back, not the front, dipped when you braked. I also liked the way the stereo was mounted vertically between the front seats, so if you dropped bits from your croissant they would fall into the cassette slot and jam it. And then you had indicators that didn’t self-cancel; you pushed a rocker switch on the instrument binnacle, made the turn and drove for 60km wondering why everyone was flashing their lights at you.

The CX was a comfortable, spacious and very good looking car. But it was bonkers. That’s why you bought a Volvo instead.

Other French cars I didn’t want but nevertheless liked include the Peugeot 504 convertible and 205 GTI, the Renault Fuego turbo and the mid-engined Renault Clio. All the other thousands and thousands of cars the French have made were school-field-trip dull.

So I wasn’t terribly excited to discover that my test car would be Renault’s new Clio. I knew what it’d be like. Clangy doors. A clattery diesel engine. Foam seats and a weirdly high safety rating from Euro NCAP, which is backed by the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.

First things first. It doesn’t have clangy doors. They close with the exact sound a landing parachutist makes when his equipment has failed to open. And there’s more. When you turn a knob, it feels as if there’s some weight behind it, as if Renault’s knob man may have actually attached it to something. Also, the seats are grippy and comfortable. I’m going to say it. This car feels German.

Then you set off and immediately it doesn’t feel German. German cars are schloss-dungeon hard. They don’t need compliant suspension because in Germany potholes are against the law. The new Clio is that rarest of things, a car that rides nicely and corners well too. It also has absolutely beautiful steering. The engine’s not bad either. It’s smooth enough, and economical, but on a hill you do need to change down if you want to keep moving. Perhaps this is why – surprise, surprise – the Clio has a five-star safety rating: you’re never going fast enough to hurt yourself in a crash.

And the good news keeps on coming, because it’s practical as well. It has a boot bigger than any other car in this class and a decent chunk of real estate in the back. After only two days I was beginning to think that finally someone had made a better small car than the Ford Fiesta. I was really, really enjoying it. And then I had a look at the prices and was amazed to see that it costs less than its main rivals. So, this car is good value, fun to drive, safe, spacious and seemingly very well screwed together.

However, while people like to think they care about this kind of stuff, what they actually want are features that make passengers envious. And that’s where the Renault comes unstuck.

My test car had a huge iPad-type screen attached to the dash, which is used to control everything. Well, that’s what someone will have said in a biscuits-and-flipchart meeting. But it simply didn’t work properly. After a few days I learnt to get in the car about an hour before I needed to set off so I had time to wait for the screen to warm up. But even when it did, there were still problems. It’s possible, for example, to change the dash so you have a rev counter display, but achieving this took (I’m not exaggerating) 40 minutes. Apple knows how to make screens that work. Renault does not.

Then you have the buttons on the steering wheel. Push any one of those and you get a mildly different readout on the dash. Eventually I resorted to looking in the instruction book, but that wasn’t much help.

And then it got worse, because the seatbelt warning “bong” started even though my seatbelt was done up. Being told to do something you’ve already done is mind-bogglingly annoying. After a few minutes of this I wanted to kill everyone in the whole world.

What we have here, then, is a really good little car that’s been ruined by all the show-off electronic tat you don’t need – unless you buy the entry-level Play version without all the flim-flam, that is.

I still love the Fiesta, but I’m fairly sure the base Clio would be a sound alternative. It may well be even more than that: the first French car in years you’d actually want to buy.

Renault Clio TCe 100

Engine: 1.0-litre three-cylinder turbo-petrol (74kW/160Nm)

Average fuel 4.4 litres per 100km

Transmission: Five-speed manual, front-wheel drive

Price: From £17,995 (Australian release TBA)

Rating: ★★★★