About the Renault 4
Provenance: Maubeuge, France
Price: €36,700
Range: 409km
Top speed: 150km/h
Capacity: 5 people
A “head-turner” typically has sporty flanks: beguiling curves that envelop a growling engine. Then there’s the other sort that’s about making the everyday more toothsome than bothersome. You could say that a car revived from history’s drawing board, such as the Renault 4 – which hit the market in July 2025 – is an exercise in nostalgia. Or you could just call it cute. Either way, the all-electric R4 (abbreviated for your busy life) is a head-turner, a charming example of beauty combined with utility.
Monocle collects the R4 that we’re testing from Renault’s historic citadel in Paris’s southwestern suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. We are but a honk of the horn from the Île Seguin factory that patted the first of some eight million 4s on their boxy little derrières from 1961 to 1992, before sending them putt-putting out into the world. That 4 was the second-bestselling Renault ever so the sight of its reincarnation is cause for many a wave or indulgent smile from Parisians both four-wheeled and perambulatory.
From its box-on-a-box silhouette to its bright-eyed face and retro rear lights, the R4 shows us that it’s happy (earning it a couple of stars). It remembers the family roadtrips to Biarritz with the dog in the boot and surfboards on the roof but it’s mostly looking the other way, to the future – in our case, northwest along the Seine out of Paris.
To make speedy headway, we take the big, boring A13, which provides a good opportunity to inspect the R4’s interior while not looking at the road (it’s got “driver aids”, chill out). You’re mini-SUV high, which makes things easy, and there’s a lot of room – you could take a lot of dogs to Biarritz (yes, this is now the measure of automotive spaciousness). The infotainment system is fine but, as ever, please, designers, use more knobs and fewer swipes.
Once in the Normandy countryside, we wind the little chap uphill and then down a dale to see what the car’s “Sport” mode is like. And it’s good: a subtle tightening of the steering makes the already-nimble vehicle nicely supple, while the electric motor loses any hint of Golf Cart Syndrome to deliver its power like a petrol engine – gradually, properly, via the right pedal. It’s great fun. Four étoiles d’or for liveliness.
After a sunny lunch and much Sporting about, we realise that our battery life (typically offering some 254 miles or 409km; approximately the distance from Paris to Mont Saint-Michel) is diminishing and so head back to Paris. The traffic, though, is too clogged so we park next to the Panthéon for a little out-of-the-boot picnic. Students, tourists and gendarmes come over to offer a nod of approval – especially for the Tricolore-tastic elastic boot strap that is ideal for securing a baguette and a bottle of wine on a cross-country drive. Such consideration earns three more gold stars for our R4.
Renault’s former design chief, Gilles Vidal, and his team, have done a wonderful job. The R4 is bigger than it seems, almost as fun as an old-school hot hatch and clever about where it sits on the retro-future see-saw. I make that a nine. And nine out of four ain’t bad.