Photo: Sandor Soday – Origo / Sandor Soday – Origo
For decades, Renault has been constantly trying to squeeze premium German manufacturers into its hunting ground, the upper-middle segment, no easy task, if only because of long-standing prejudices about French cars.
Up until now, the tactic has been that the big Renaults always have something quirky, or a twist, with which they can stand out from the boring Germans.
For example, the 16, 30, 25 “speaker” and Safrane models came out with a five-door hatchback body, which was a bold move against the strictly four-door German competition (possibly station wagons). in spite of saffron It was even available with a 263-horsepower turbo V6, and comfort was its main trump card, which didn't work About Phil Satis It can also be said.
Photo: Renault
It was built on the same technical foundations as the latter Avantimewith which Renault attempted to create a coach-limousine coupé category – with more moderate success, as evidenced by a production of less than 9,000 copies. Then, in the 2000s, the four-door Latitude developed and built by South Korea's Samsung arrived. Its only special feature was ionizing air conditioning, but that didn't stop it from being completely uninteresting, too. The French-developed Talisman was a much better attempt in 2015, and it's a shame that ordinary people often confuse it with the much cheaper Mégane.
Photo: Sandor Soday – Origo / Sandor Soday – Origo
This certainly won't happen with the subject of this article, the Rafale, because it already has a design
It was manufactured according to the new Renault design language characterized by star designer Gil Vidal.
Start with a clean slate. It doesn't look like it from the outside, but the full-body all-wheel-drive coupe is technically close to the Austral and Espace. It's based on the same CMF-CD platform as that, but is longer and wider than both. The French engineers got the most out of the flexible front-wheel drive floorplate (just as in the case of the Symbioz with a small car platform, but in the lower middle class).
What does the largest Renault car look like?
Photo: Sandor Soday – Origo / Sandor Soday – Origo
Vidal worked at PSA before 2020, and it is undeniable that there are some similarities between the Rafale and the Peugeot 408. Almost both. It's a tall five-door coupe measuring 4.7 meters long, but the Renault is bigger and more aggressive, so much so that there's no need to shy away from it next to the Audi Q5 Sportback and BMW X4. Or a Mercedes GLC Coupe. So now they went to Renault: they didn't try a new body shape, but they targeted the most popular segment today, the elevated off-road coupé.
