I don’t have my OED with me, but I think it is not too inaccurate to describe ‘progress’ as a movement from one place or position to another. Often this is interpreted as a positive thing, but as I have been minded to note before in this column over the years, not all progress is in the right direction. Indeed quite of lot of progress merely seems to be on the right road until you get to your destination, turn around, look back and find yourself rather wishing you’d never set out at all.
I’ve had this feeling in spades this week, in which I’ve spent quite a lot of the time bombing about the lanes in a 44-year-old Renault 5. Not, I should mention, an Alpine, Gordini or Turbo, let alone anything with its engine where its rear seats should be, but an everyday, ho-hum, common-or-garden Renault 5TL. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the carfolio.com website, but for me it’s the go-to source for statistical information on almost all mainstream old cars about which I wish to find out more. And it states that a 5TL has a 1,108cc, four-cylinder pushrod motor pumping out a not very awesome 45PS (34kW). This was enough for it to hit 60mph from rest in a stately 16 seconds and top out at a mighty 89mph which, to be honest, is quite a lot faster than I expected.
So it’s not very fast. Who cares? It’s brilliant. There is so much to love here and the looks are only the start. One of the first compact hatchbacks, it is fabulously space efficient with room for four in a car so startlingly small you might think there is barely space for two. But I bet the internal dimensions would compare favourably with a modern Clio despite it being over half a metre longer and a quarter of a metre wider.
And the old R5 is superb to drive. The French just did these cars better than anyone else because they understood that if a car is light, so long as it is also well conceived and laid out, it doesn’t need hard suspension to handle well. Let ‘em roll is the philosophy and it works absolutely: with independent suspension at all four corners – unlike any modern small hatchback I can think of – the angles it can adopt mid corner might make an outsider gasp in shock, but inside all you’ll hear are hoots of laughter from you and your passengers.
But really, it’s all about the ride. The car is so compliant, so good at absorbing all it finds in its way it makes you wonder how small modern cars get it so wrong today. And the truth is that people have long forgotten what they’re missing and it’s far cheaper and easier to slap a torsion beam rear axle on a car than design a proper independent suspension system.
If only I hadn’t had that crash. No, not this year, but decades ago, yet the memory lingers. I wasn’t even in a Renault 5 at the time, but in a big BMW watching one of these little French hatches coming towards me. It was a long, straight and quite wide road; the weather was perfect, but it was clearly on the wrong side of said road and showing no sign of slowing or correcting its line. I thought about diving onto the wrong side too, so we’d still pass but realised that if he realised his mistake at the same time and swerved, we’d still crash but now it would be me who was on the wrong side of the road. So I stopped the car and awaited further developments.
Which involved said Renault piling into the front of the BMW at unabated speed. There were no skid marks, no sign at all that the driver had attempted to slow. For me and my then girlfriend (now wife), the impact was so small it didn’t even trigger the airbags, though we were both bruised by our seatbelts. For the two people in the Renault, the situation appeared rather more serious.
The car had folded up like a Swiss army knife, the roof caving in and coming to rest on the back seat. Had anyone been sitting there, they’d have been killed without question. In the driver’s seat was an elderly gentleman, clearly in shock and struggling for breath on account of the steering wheel against his chest. In the passenger seat was a middle-aged lady, who later transpired to be his daughter, who was hysterical in the very worst sense of the word.
Mercifully the police were there in minutes, a patrol just happening to be nearby, and once the passengers had been released from the wreckage they were found to be essentially uninjured, which was one of the most remarkable deliverances I’ve been lucky enough – if that’s even the right word – to witness. The driver fully accepted blame, he could do little else, and said he’d simply been thinking about something else at the time. Examining the inside of his eyelids I expect.
They were so lucky. But every time I’ve got into that little Renault this week I’ve thought of that crash. It’ll never stop me driving such cars and it’s probably built like a bank vault compared to my 1950s 2CV, but I guess it does illustrate that at least some progress has been worth it. Modern equivalents may be soulless and dull by comparison, but they do tend to look after you rather better and who am I to say that, ultimately, that is not what matters most?