TORIES and Liberal Democrats, look away now. The buzzword I’ve heard most since the establishment of Cameron’s Britain is “austerity”.
Blame who you like but austerity is everywhere, from the library that shut down six months ago to the vacant shops dotting the town centres. The TV screens are awash with anarchic imagery of Greek people burning things and news correspondents looking confused, unsure of which political party or city banker to blame it all on. Everyone knows these are austere times. Except Renault.
The French, you see, are reckoning on a reinvention of the iconic Renault 5 as a way to light up the supermini market in the way the latest Clio and Twingo haven’t, but they’re making the mistake of tilting it squarely at the Citroen DS3. This, in Cameron’s Britain, is a mistake.
I like to think I know a bit about the Renault 5 because I owned one and absolutely loved it. While the fact my very ropey Campus model cost just £100 helped, it really was the archetypal austerity car. Due to the fact it came with absolutely no equipment at all the engineering effort went into making sure the few bits you did get worked perfectly, and even after 120,000 miles it still started on the button every single time. I suspected it’d survive everything up to and including a light nuclear blast.
It was also much, much quicker than an ancient 1.4 hatchback had any right to be and easily the most spacious car I’ve owned. Both, I suspect, down to there being absolutely nothing in the way of luxuries to weigh it down or clutter it up. Prison cells come better equipped these days than the old 5 did.
But the new one, if predictions are right, won’t be a car for peasants and paupers, but a posh one with all sorts of unnecessarily bourgeois equipment like cruise control and electric windows and central locking. In the old one, you were lucky if you got a working heater!
What Cameron’s Britain of spending cuts and soaring unemployment needs isn’t a Renault 5 that’s weighed down with pricey electrical equipment that’ll only break anyway. It needs a real replacement for the old warhorse, which offers cash-strapped families a five star Euro NCAP safety rating – another Renault tradition, don’t forget – and absolutely nothing else so that they too can afford a brand new car.
Then again, even if Renault does bring out a new and rather more decadent reinvention of the 5 it won’t reach us until at least 2014. Maybe they know something about an economic recovery the rest of us don’t?