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Geek Out! At what cost?
5 months ago
Budget brand Dacia has used Renault's cost-cutting philosophy to great effect
To understand why, we have to take a short trip back to the 1970s and an ongoing desire to create a cheap people’s car that would assume some of the role fulfilled by the ageing Renault 4. Various schemes were hatched under the catch-all working title of VBG (short for Voiture Bas de Gamme or Low End Car) but every effort was dashed on the rocks of sensible accountancy. By the mid 1980s the powerful Confédération Générale du Travail trade union got so frustrated with Renault’s inability to get an affordable people’s car across the line, it took the unusual step of designing its own boxy and basic proposal called Neutral, an anagram of Renault. The union pitched it to management with the hope it could be built in the Billancourt factory, averting its closure and the resulting mass redundancies but Renault was not sold and gave the union’s plan a flat ‘non’.
Renault chairman Georges Besse wanted to concentrate the company’s efforts on AMC, its ill-fated acquisition in the USA, signing off Americanised versions of the R21 and R25, and a Federalised Alpine GTA but then, in a dramatic twist, just 10 days after passing on the Neutral proposal, Besse was assassinated.
His replacement, Raymond Lévy, immediately soft pedalled Renault’s American adventures and re-focused on Europe with a cheap small car back on the agenda under the codename X06. But to have a chance at making it to the showroom, this new model had to be budgeted to the bone and heralded a new way of thinking, known within Renault as ‘design-to-cost’. Under this fresh corporate mentality, instead of coming up with a part for the car and then inviting suppliers to pitch their best possible price for it, a maximum unit cost was set in stone. Suppliers were then told if they wanted the business, they would have to meet that target, not suck air in through their teeth while thinking of a number that suited them. So hardline was this policy that the X06 project boss would start supplier meetings for specific components by pulling a wad of francs from his wallet corresponding to the immoveable unit price and slapping it on the table with the words, ‘that’s all I can pay’. A tough policy, but one that eventually got the new small car signed off for production and allowed X06 to become what we know as the first generation Twingo.
"The lone engine spec at launch was married to a single trim level and just four paint colours"
Nailing parts prices to the floor was only part of the story, however. The brilliance of the Twingo as a piece of delightful but cost-effective design was that it committed to a single engine and power output. Armed with the knowledge that there were no plans to make a faster version, engineers knew they didn’t need to protect the package for bigger brakes or wider tyres and could cost-effectively optimise the chassis to be absolutely right for 1.2 litres and 54 furious horsepower.
But the smart thinking didn’t stop there. To make the Twingo cheap and easy to build, the lone engine spec at launch was married to a single trim level and just four paint colours. Sadly for British customers, the push for tooling and assembly simplicity also ruled out making the Twingo in right-hand drive.
Thought was put into every detail which is why, for example, the mk1 Twingo wore its radio aerial on the driver’s door mirror mount, not simply to be quirky but because sticking it there saved the cost of running a wire up to the roof. The first Twingo’s seats were a less successful piece of money saving, using an innovative technique in which the cloth was bonded directly to the foam which was great for the bottom line but not so good for actual bottoms since, according to customer feedback, a lack of breathability led to unacceptable buttockular sweatiness.
“The exterior mirrors were just one design that could be flipped over to work on the opposite door, and even the rubbing strips were from a single symmetrical moulding, used on both sides”
The really interesting thing about the Twingo, however, is that it instilled in Renault a hardcore cost controlling mindset that would stand it in good stead when, in 1999, it bought Dacia and embarked on a plan to create a brand new car with a target price of just €5000. This came to fruition as the Logan saloon of 2004, launched in Romania at a base price of €6280, not quite the original target but still extremely cheap.
To achieve this, Renault engineers had to go hard on the ‘design-to-cost’ policy, and think creatively about every element of the car. Carryover parts from the Renault family helped, of course, and smart thinking like using the exact engine bay layout of the Clio so that existing engines required no modification, and there was no need to spend time and money developing new assembly processes. Pragmatism was all over the Logan, including panels designed to be simple and shallow so they could be pressed reliably and cheaply, likewise glass with minimum curvature. The exterior mirrors were just one design that could be flipped over to work on the opposite door, and even the rubbing strips were from a single symmetrical moulding, used on both sides. The father of the Logan, Gérard Detourbet, was famously hard-nosed when it came to costs, leaving procurement contracts open to tender until perilously close to start of production if he thought he could squeeze a few more cents off a part’s price. And Detourbet’s last project before ill-health forced his retirement in 2017 was the electrified version of the Renault Kwid.
The electric Renault Kwid was the forerunner to Porter's Dacia Spring
Which brings me back to my Dacia Spring and, because I’m strange, the joy I get from spotting all the ways in which classic Renault cost control has been applied. It starts at the front where the charging port sits on the nose, an inspired piece of thinking cribbed from Ti contributor David Twohig who, in his former life at Renault, put the plug hole on the nose of the ZOE because mounting the on-board charger up front saves running high voltage cables to the rear of the car. Then you notice the Spring’s other subtle details, such as the chunky side protection panels which are in fact stickers rather than more costly plastic, the rear badge also made from a sticker, and the big panels behind the rear side windows which are not stickers, but are made of plastic rather than glass, saving money on guides and seals.
On the inside, the front seats have one-piece ‘tombstone’ backrests so there’s no need to splash cash on separate headrests and attendant adjustment facilities. The seats themselves are flat and simple, so they can be upholstered with minimal cutting and therefore fabric wastage, and the passenger airbag sits behind a visibly separate panel, dodging the need for complicated and expensive tooling to create hidden deployment cutlines in the dash moulding. The front electric window switches are, of course, on the dashboard not the doors to save on wiring.
In the short time I’ve had the car I’ve delighted in spotting these little touches which, for the most part, do nothing to diminish your experience as an owner. In some ways the Spring is fundamentally quite basic; to get it going you turn a key in a slot, to make it stay where you left it you yank on a lever between the seats, but I’m an old fart so I like this stuff as much as I like the way it reminds me of those tinny French snotboxes we grew up with in the 1990s.
In some ways, however, it’s not so old fashioned, coming with loads of safety tech because it has to, plus wireless CarPlay and an app that tells you about your state of charge and lets you crank the heater on cold mornings while you’re still chugging your first coffee inside.
That a very cheap, relatively simple car can offer such functionality is impressive and I sometimes wonder how Dacia can manage it. But then I remember that my model badge is a sticker and my window controls are on the dash. And that, sometimes, cost control isn’t a bad thing at all.
Massive thanks to David Twohig for supplying extra information and wise guidance for this story.
