To nobody’s great surprise, the other day the Renault 5 and Alpine A290 jointly won the 2025 Car of the Year award (the original and still the best of the big international car awards thingies).
I haven’t driven the regular model, but I have driven the performance variant and enjoyed it very much. A friend of a relative has decided to order one on the back of my review, so I hope I wasn’t wrong.
Anyway, what also appealed to them about the 5/A290 is the treatment that Renault has given this car, resurrecting not just a famous name but also the looks to go with it.
In the face of huge competition not just from traditional rivals but also a surging Chinese car industry, it’s a trick that has been recommended by marketers and brewing for a while.
The idea is to remind customers that one has been making cars for a long time and is particularly good at it, so this is a model you can trust. Hence if you remember the 5 from the first time around, you will have a slightly warm, fuzzy feeling towards the new one already.
China’s SAIC bought and uses the MG brand here for precisely that reason, but applying the heritage trick to a particular model is an advantage that young car makers can’t mimic.
For some customers and in market research clinics, maybe it doesn’t register, but there are enough new Fiat 500s and Minis on the road to suggest it’s a strategy that works.
It’s almost a surprise to me that more car makers don’t do it more often – but then I talk to some designers and realise why.
They think it’s clear that you don’t progress in life by looking backwards, that the world moves ever onwards and they didn’t become designers or creatives for a living to just redraw something somebody did 30 years ago.
Many, many designers are allergic to retro. They would rather create icons than recreate them. Think of bands that don’t like playing their early hits, and they even wrote them.
I get it. But at a point, if it’s clear that it will be what customers want, because it confers a sense of familiarity and trust or nostalgia, it takes dispassionate leadership to say: “Suck it up, team, and get on with it.” (I’m not suggesting this is what happened at Renault, by the way; the designers there might have all loved the idea from the outset.)
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The difference is that one is a ground-up new design that riffs off the original and is an actual car, the other is a badge-engineered VW awkward hatchback-thing on stilts.
Renault has more experience with EVs than any other European manufacturer, so has put together a strong package for a reasonable price. Good interior, too. It would sell well under any other name, the 5 nameplate is icing on the cake. But it does fit, because like the original it's a compact, attractive, keenly priced car.
Ford's Capri and Mustang Mach-E are more cynical badge engineering exercises, which never goes down well. The originals were/are sporty coupes, which a crossover can never be. An electric Mustang might anger hardcore petrolheads, but could win over a new audience who are put off combustion sports cars (especially at the Mustang's budget end of the market) by high fuel and running costs, and would be competing in a market with zero direct rivals. A proper Capri could reignite the brand the way the 5 is doing for Renault.
But Ford's European market approach is extremely problematic *generally speaking*, not just these two cars. They've decided to become an SUV-only brand (proper Mustang aside), in a region where the Fiesta and Focus have always been huge hits. They're making Americanness the focus of their advertising and styling (huge F O R D grill logo, rather than the blue oval), in a region where that's never been a selling point: just ask Chrysler or Chevrolet. Lots of head-scratching decisions being made over there.
The reporter won by a checkMatt over Ford with its "retro" model, so different from its Prior model.