Renault turned its 1972 icon into a €25k EV — and Europe's best-selling small EV

By 2020 Renault was a European giant with a brand problem: profitable but unloved, its car line a wall of forgettable nameplates while the electric transition threatened to commoditise everything. Luca de Meo arrived as CEO in July 2020 with a turnaround plan he called Renaulution, promising seven new electric models by 2025 and 30% full-electric sales. The centrepiece he chose was not a new name but an old one: the Renault 5, the 1972 hatchback that sold nine million over two generations and was France's best-selling car for a decade.

Renault revealed the 5 Prototype in January 2021 as part of Renaulution, a retro-futuristic electric city car that designer Gilles Vidal described as the 'cult model of our heritage' made relevant again. De Meo then raised the stakes publicly: the car, he announced, would be developed in just 24 months — 'I hadn't asked anyone and when I said it, I could see at the back of the room my engineering chief holding his head in his hands,' he admitted later.

The engineering answer was to reuse everything: a new low-cost platform, AmpR, built on existing Renault technology and battery chemistry, with pricing engineered down to the target — the car landed from around €25,000, or £22,995 for the 40kWh version in Britain, a whisker under the promise. It reached customers in 2024, roughly three years after the prototype rather than the five a clean-sheet programme usually takes.

The market verdict was emphatic: the Renault 5 E-Tech won European Car of the Year 2025 and, by the first half of 2026, ranked as the best-selling B-segment electric vehicle in Europe — a revival of a fifty-year-old badge outselling purpose-built EVs from far richer rivals.

European Car of the Year 2025 and the best-selling B-segment EV in Europe by H1 2026, priced from £22,995 — a whisker under its own target

The EV transition made small-car economics brutal, and a heritage nameplate with nine million nostalgic owners was the cheapest possible marketing asset to sell them.

A retro design halo let Renault charge brand-premium prices for a city car while still undercutting VW's and Stellantis' small EVs.

De Meo's public 24-month pledge turned the deadline into a company-wide commitment nobody at Renault could quietly slip.

Reusing existing platforms and battery chemistry on the new AmpR base made the tight timeline and low price technically possible rather than aspirational.

Heritage is an asset class: a beloved dead nameplate gave Renault instant differentiation without a new brand's marketing spend, and the public deadline made the revival non-negotiable.

The 5 became the anchor of a heritage revival strategy: an Alpine A290 performance version followed, a Renault 4 E-Tech revived the next icon on the same platform, and Renault kept refreshing the 5 itself — a 2026 update switched to cheaper LFP batteries with more power and range. What began as one car became the template for how a mass-market carmaker competes with Tesla on character instead of scale.