I shoved the easily lost flat electronic key to the new Renault 4 in a pocket and stole into the driver’s seat. Take a beat here. There are 30 UK journalists on this launch, one for every year of the original R4’s production run and an auto-da-fé for the sales ambitions for this curious crossover, which uses the battery-electric mechanicals from this year’s Car of the Year, the Renault 5.
Renault, which once looked so resolutely forward in its designs, is now looking backwards, reviving models, names and even record breakers. We’re in Portugal, where it doesn’t take a deerstalker or a meerschaum pipe to find original R4s still doing their job, work worn, but serviceable.
My memory scrolled back to riding in the original R4 in the 1960s. My father’s friend managed a huge Dorset estate, where they’d sold off all the unreliable Land Rovers and bought a fleet of R4s. Convalescing after a serious accident, I stayed with the family for a month. He drove his R4 everywhere, across fields, through the woods to pheasant pens, working Labradors in the back slobbering over our shoulders, shotguns over the seat backs, barrels broken.
