Renault Scenic review: A utility champion remade as something less …
Renault stole a march with the first Scenic. You’d have thought that the rest of the car industry would have taken a bit more notice when, in 1991, the French brand showed up with the Safety Concept Embodied in a New Innovative Car (Scenic – get it?), but it didn’t. And when the production version, designed by a team under Anne Asensio, broke cover in 1996, she might as well have walked around with a pair of dressmaker’s scissors cutting the belts of all the rivals, such was their state of trousers down.
With the Scenic, Renault[1] invented the family multi-purpose vehicle (MPV) class and lived high on the hog of its unopposed success.
It’s worth reminding ourselves just how popular the Scenic was. At the start of production, Renault had anticipated demand from its Douai plant near Lille would be about 450 a day. At its peak, the plant was churning out 2,500 a day.
Eventually, the competition lumbered into view: Vauxhall’s Zafira, Fiat’s weirdly styled but loveable Multipla, Ford’s fine riding C-Max, Citroen’s cheap and cheerful Xsara Picasso[2], and Nissan’s Almera Tino.
Did Renault care? Did it heck. By 2003 and the launch of the second generation, Renault chairman Louis Schweitzer told The Telegraph: “the whole of our mid-sized plans start and end with Scenic.”
Then the rot set in. A love affair with electronics and gadgets, such as the digital electroluminescence dashboard, the keyless immobiliser and automatic parking brakes, couldn’t be sated by Renault’s basically poor quality. While it had taken rivals at least two years to catch up, when they did, they did it better.
But 20 years is a long time in the motor industry and the public was growing tired of driving basically the same car. By 2016 Top Gear was listing the Scenic as one of the most boring cars, and sales started to fall as the public started a long and abiding love affair with the SUV.
MPVs died, and while there’s still a rump of sales, family SUVs took over and now represent over half of total European new car sales. In 2016, Renault produced the Mk4 Scenic. It was quite a nice car, though more of a crossover than an MPV, but it didn’t sell and so in 2022 Renault threw in the towel.
The return of the Scenic
But now, it’s back, and it’s electric. The new all-electric Renault Scenic E-Tech goes on sale in early 2024, complete with a collective brain wash on the British public, asserting that the Scenic is not and was never an MPV. Instead the E-Tech is – wait for it – ‘a family solution’ vehicle. Hmm…
Unkind folk might be tempted to observe that this new non-MPV Scenic is nothing more than a stretched Megane, with a front style that wouldn’t look out of place in the portfolio of Gilles Vidal when he was chef de felt tips at Peugeot (he’s now Renault’s director of design).
It’s 4,407mm long, 1,861mm wide without the mirrors, 1,571mm high and runs on a 2,784mm wheelbase.
References
- ^ Renault (www.telegraph.co.uk)
- ^ Citroen’s cheap and cheerful Xsara Picasso (www.telegraph.co.uk)