Almost Great: Renault Avantime

The September 2000 Paris Motor Show was an odd one for me. Not only had we all survived the Millennium Bug (Google it, kids…it’s filed under ‘anticlimax’), but I was also attending the show no longer as an employee of Nissan Motor Company, but as a small cog in a new-fangled machine called the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

No longer was I a faithful salaryman of the car maker whose very name means ‘The Japanese Car Company’. Precisely 5.52 per cent of me was now a French civil servant – the French state owning 15 per cent of Renault, and Renault having taken a 36.8 per cent stake in Nissan the previous year, thereby saving my company from certain death.