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.
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Can't possibly bring back a car from I think sixty years ago, Vauxhall used Viva again briefly I think and it bombed as well!, no, old car names belong in the past.
What's clear is that car makers have run out of ideas to sell EV's to the masses - they've tried everything to shift them in the numbers they need. Now, they're reverting to classic names from the past to try and generate some interest. I think they'll all start doing this now, and hope that nostalgia will do the trick. Unfortunately, just becauase a new EV might have a name you remember doesn't mean it has any of the character or charm and it will certainly be a LOT more expensive.
Do people really care about retro looks? Its about style. If it looks good, it doesnt matter if its retro or bang up to date. But retro have an advantage, in that if the original looked good, then there is a chance the follow up will too. The 5 looks a bit too SUV to my eyes, and no small hatch ever looked good with 5 doors either, but i can see why others like it. The Capri doesnt look like anything, its a blob on stilts. The MACH E looks better, but more like a Hyundai than a Mustang. The new Frontera looks terrible too. The original was quite stylish, even if it was actually crap. But it sold well.
What i find so odd with Ford, is that 2 of their best names have been wasted on poor products. If they had called them Edsel, or Pilot i doubt any of this fuss would have happened, and if/when they make a real coupe again they would have a great name waiting for it