Mon Dieu! Bonkers 533bhp Renault 5 Turbo 3E is selling fast, even with £135,000 price tag
Rear-wheel-drive hot hatch on steroids will be made in limited numbers, with each one hand-built to customers’ specifications
The wait list for the absurd Renault 5 Turbo 3E opened just two days ago, yet the first 500 of the 1,980 examples of this hand-built, pocket-sized supercar that will be made have already been snapped up!
It’s an even more impressive feat when you consider the hot hatch on steroids has a starting price of £135,000. However the lucky individuals who get to buy a Turbo 3E will have practically limitless scope for customisation, and the most heavily personalised cars are likely to cost close to £200,000.
That’s the same money as a Porsche 911 GT3 RS, although as Renault’s design boss Gilles Vidal pointed out to us earlier this year, for the people most likely to buy this car it constitutes small change, given their garages are most likely populated by supercars and hypercars.
As Vidal put it: “For those kinds of guys, it will be like me buying a cup of coffee, basically.”
Clearly, at least 500 people have got enough cash to splash on a R5 Turbo 3E. Those who have already secured one will receive a priority build slot, and the option to select the exact number of car they get.
The total number of Turbo 3Es that will be produced is a nod to the original, outrageous Renault 5 Turbo that was launched in 1980.
Customers will be able to start designing their Turbo 3E by early next year, before the unique specifications are finalised in 2027, when production and the first deliveries are set to get under way. Each car will be built in France by a specialist team.
In case you hadn’t heard, yes, the Turbo 3E is an electric car, but it has stuck to the same radical formula as the rally-bred R5 Turbo, and later Turbo 2, by shoving a hugely powerful, rear-wheel-drive powertrain into a package smaller than a VW Golf, sporting bonkers bodywork and an equally outrageous interior.
In fact, the Turbo 3E shares almost nothing with today’s Renault 5 or its spicier sister car, the Alpine A290, that have just landed in showrooms. It even sits on a bespoke platform developed by renowned sports car maker Alpine, and uses a brand-new type of electric motor that’s capable of explosive power delivery.
Renault 5 Turbo 3E design
The styling of the new Turbo 3E is remarkably close to its ancestors from the eighties, as well as a somehow even crazier-looking concept model with the same name that Renault unveiled in 2021.
The idea for the concept car came from Renault’s design team, when the brand was looking to prove it can “make electric cars interesting and exciting,” according to Vidal, rather than “those robotic, white, sluggish things you see driving about”.
He also told us after doing the retro-cool R5 and R4, the team wanted to make “something special, an event, a car that's stunning, strong and powerful”.
Vidal admitted “there’s a million reasons” Renault could have decided not to put the car into production and that “you have to be brave to do a project like this, and you have to be brave to drive it around as well”. But, as he sees it, “the world is stressful and boring enough, and a brand should bring something exciting, lively, colourful, to the table”.
The Renault Group’s design director, Laurens van den Acker, added that the biggest eye-opener from this project “was how close we can actually get to the concept and make it happen if the company is behind it. I'm not saying this is the best business case of all the products that we do, but it's definitely a fantastic brand builder”.
Renault has gone as far as creating a totally unique body for the Turbo 3E with two doors, rather than the four on the regular R5, and it’s made entirely of carbon fibre for lightness. The whole car tips the scales at 1,450kg, although Vidal revealed to us that the team is looking to whittle that number down to exactly 1,400kg, if possible.
The gorgeous flared wheelarches are an iconic part of the original R5 Turbo, so, of course, have been carried over to the new model. They’re even bigger this time, not just to make the Turbo 3E look as mean as possible or as wide as some supercars, but also because the engineers needed enough space to accommodate the in-wheel electric motors at the rear.
In case you’re wondering, the only aspects of the styling shared with the regular R5 are the windscreen (although it’s slightly shorter on the Turbo 3E), the door mirrors, the vertical rear lights and the 5 badge on the bootlid.
The various scoops and vents are functional, too, with the enormous one in the bonnet pulling air through the radiator in the nose. Meanwhile, the intakes at the rear are used to help cool the motors, with hot air exiting through more vents in those huge haunches.
The 20-inch wheels are wrapped in Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, with 245-section rubber up front and 275-section on the rear. The rims have aero covers to help with range on the road, but as is written clearly on them, when drivers get to the track, these need to be removed for maximum brake cooling. At the rear, the diffuser’s eccentric shape and size are accentuated by a comparatively small and restrained roof spoiler.
The lucky individuals who are able to buy one will be able to choose from a variety of liveries and colour schemes, including a yellow, white and black design taken from the Tour de Corse 1982 rally car. But there are no bounds to what buyers can customise with the help of Renault’s team of designers, to ensure their Turbo 3E is truly unique.
The Renault 5 Turbo 3E measures 4.08 metres long and 2.03 metres wide, compared with the ordinary R5 that’s 3.92 metres by 1.77 metres. Unsurprisingly, it’s much lower, too, at 1.38 metres tall, with just 118mm of ground clearance, which is hopefully enough to avoid scraping the front splitter.
Renault 5 Turbo 3E powertrain and 0-62mph
While Renault’s people handled the design of the Turbo 3E, work under the bodywork was done by engineers at the brand’s performance arm, Alpine. They created a dedicated aluminium platform with an 800-volt electrical architecture, like you’ll find in the Porsche Taycan or Hyundai Ioniq 5 N.
The original Renault 5 Turbo famously ditched the traditional front-drive hot hatch configuration, and instead had a 160bhp turbocharged 1.4-litre four-cylinder engine mounted just in front of the rear wheels it drove.
The Turbo 3E is powered by two rear-mounted, in-wheel electric motors that produce 533bhp and an unholy 4,800Nm of torque; this results in a 0-62mph time of less than 3.5 seconds and a power-to-weight ratio of 372 horsepower per tonne, which is better than a Porsche 911 GT3 can offer. Meanwhile, the top speed is 168mph.
That’s not all. According to Renault, the car’s special e-motors offer even more immediate power delivery than regular ones, yet are smaller and lighter. This set-up also helps make the car as agile as possible, by controlling the output from each motor to provide torque vectoring.
Under the floor is a 70kWh battery that offers up to 248 miles of range, or enough energy for up to half an hour of serious track driving, as well as giving a low centre of gravity that boosts agility further.
Thanks to the 800V system, the Turbo 3E has a maximum charging speed of 350kW – more than three times as fast as the regular R5’s – so a 15 to 80 per cent top-up takes just 15 minutes. The charge port is hidden inside one of the rear air scoops, as a nod to the original’s scoop-mounted fuel filler.
Renault 5 Turbo 3E interior
Inside, the Turbo 3E features two carbon-fibre bucket seats with six-point harnesses, a roll cage where you might expect the rear seats to be, a rally-style handbrake lever sticking out of the centre console for executing perfect drifts, and – in the passenger footwell – the message ‘accroche toi’, which means ‘hang on’.
There’s also Alcantara just about everywhere you look, which on the model we saw features a hand-drawn, cartoon-like tartan pattern. Sadly, Renault hasn’t made a carbon-fibre baguette holder yet, but there is a kneepad for the passenger on the centre console.
That said, not everything is unique to this car. For instance, the three-spoke, flat-bottomed steering wheel is taken from the Alpine A290 because it already has a dedicated button for toggling between the four drive modes – Snow, Regular, Sport and Race, which activates the drift assist function. There’s also a special ‘OV’ (overtake) setting for when you need the full beans, and another for adjusting the strength of the regenerative braking.
The 10.25-inch digital driver’s display and 10.1-inch touchscreen are also available on the regular R5. They run the same OpenR Link infotainment system too, with a suite of Google apps built-in, but the graphics are unique and inspired by the original Turbo’s dashboard.
Vidal told us: “We could have gone more hardcore with the interior and just have a few needles and that’s it. But we said no, we still need to have connectivity and a few features in there, especially if people are going to actually drive the car to a track rather than just put it on a trailer.”
The bank of physical climate control switches is taken from the regular R5, while the Turbo 3E swaps the column-mounted gear selector for a stubby lever on the centre console, which appears to have been borrowed from the £15k Dacia Spring.
Another benefit of having in-wheel electric motors is very little intrusion to the boot space. While the car’s exact luggage capacity hasn’t been confirmed, it looks plenty big enough for a couple of weekend bags, or helmets when you’re heading to the track.
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