Welcome back! After the last entry looking at our first ever electric car we owned as a family in 2008, today we’re going to look at our new car we bought early March 2026:
The reason we’ve had to have an internal combustion engine car in the past was us owning a horse and two of our daughters wanting to participate in show jumping competitions. This required us being able to tow a trailer with at least one horse, typically two, to the various competitions around Switzerland.
The only electric car that would be able to do this is the 7-seater Tesla Model X which was slightly incompatible with my income during the last 10 years, start-up and all. Also, I wouldn’t be sure how practical the recharges would have been en-route with horses in tow etc.
Now that our daughters are slowly moving out and the horse is older and not being used for show jumping anymore, the towing use case was less of a must-have. We, however, still had our ICE car and weren’t necessarily planning on getting a new one since it was at 250,000+ km, had no resell value at all and was still in good shape… until it just spectacularly died during a trip to Italy early 2026. We had a catastrophic engine failure due to a timing chain issue. Car dead – we sold it for parts and were left with the TWIKE and our daughter’s small hatchback.
With this, we started thinking about our next car.
To cut a long story short, we both felt that we were at the start of a new phase in our lives and that this should be reflected in our choice of car, too.
It should be a smaller car, agile – we both liked cars such as the 205, original Panda FIRE etc. and those that our parents and family members drove such as the Renault 4 and 5 and FIAT 500.
We subsequently went on some test drives and I even took a Polestar 3 on a road trip to the southern Ligurian Coast. (…which was fun! I have a soft spot for the Scandinavian design of Volvo’s and now Polestar)
Most of the cars had some serious drawbacks for us and we didn’t want to buy a Tesla…for various reasons.
At the same time, it seemed, all billboards and ads were for electric cars.
R5 and Polestar 4
After quite some time, lots of comparing, we decided to go with the Renault 5. Small, cheeky and fun.
I was super happy that my wife and I agreed that the only color this car could have was the so-called ‘yellow pop’ a deep, friendly metallic yellow.
Also, and this one of the features that made the car stand out for us: the R5 supports V2L 3.7kW and V2G AC 11kW whilst allowing us to finely manage minimum and maximum charge cycle depth and ceiling. YAY!
Then came the part where we had to wade though the seemingly endless versions, features, add-ons and services that could be purchased with the car.
One of the really attractive but totally useless features on offer was the Wicker Baguette Holder for the absolutely appropriate price of 159 CHF! 😂
In the end, we got to a configuration that matched our needs – large 52kWh battery and just a few winter comfort features such as heated seats and steering wheel. At 35k this config seemed a good enough price, given a 2.99% leasing, it was still pretty expensive on a longer timeline.
Also, I delved into the fine print of the offer regarding the Over The Air updates, basic connectivity and availability of Google services on the long run – the answers from Renault were not reassuring:
In short – Renault will provide updates for the first 5 years. Then the services will no longer be included ‘automatically’ and the price structure or extension of these services is not yet clear. Not good but this seems to be the norm with most connected cars nowadays. Curious what will stop working when the service ends! – stay tuned.
Regardless of the FOTA issue … in the end we decided to import our car from Romania where a very similar version complete with winter pack cost 26k CHF, including transport and taxes. The only two things we had to compromise on were the two additional features we had on the original config: the Harman Kardon sound system and the black roof of the techno version.
All other features were present and interestingly, whilst we would have had a few weeks to months wait for delivery if we would have bought the car via Renault in Switzerland directly, we could get our car in Romania with just a week’s wait for transfer and border processing.
So on a sunny Saturday, we finally went to the importer’s compound and picked up our car.
We clipped on our new number plate and inspected the car. Everything was impeccable, new car smell and even the V2L adapter was present.
The first few km in a new car are always nice. No dust, everything is clean and there is so much to discover.
Back home, there is a new task awaiting us that wasn’t part of a new car buying experience previously: configuring the car and connecting it to various online services … and DEACTIVATING ‘RENO’, Renault’s built-in AI assistant. This is one of the most annoying pieces of condescending software ever released!
Otherwise, this process is pretty straightforward as it essentially is like setting up a Google phone.
So, now, we now have a new car: let’s use it! 😉
Our first weekend took us on a trip to the Vosges mountains in France. 350km to get there. On our way there, we visited our favourite Carrefour in Illzach which we usually visit around 2-3 times a year to stock up on our favourite french munchies and cheeses.
This Carrefour also has a set of DC charging stations that can be accessed the way every charging station should be accessible: by tapping a credit card after getting clear indications what a kWh costs. No roaming charges, provider fees etc.
We do what every EV driver should do: plug in our car when it’s not being driven.
Two weeks later, we are invited to attend a baptism in central Italy (Terni – the same city I’ve traveled to with my TWIKE multiple times. Read about these trips here: TDI2019 – TDI2020 – TDI2024). I curiously started planning the trip using the tools Renault makes available to the ‘normal’ user.
The results are not very reassuring. The tool doesn’t go below 25% SOC and plans assuming a crazy consumption of 17kWh+ / 100km. The on-board Google planner is even worse.
Happily, I can report that if you drive down to 2% SOC, you will only have to charge twice.
No problems with charging stations and availability along the Autostrada – prices are spicy, but expected. Choose wisely; with an R5 you don’t need 350kW. 100kW chargers are usually cheaper.
For a late lunch we decided to choose a 50kW charger and give the car a full charge. Given the speed at which one eats at an Italian restaurant, we barely had the time to go through the full process at the restaurant before our car was full.
And here, on our way back, you can see that going from 10% to 42% the car is already throttling the charge below 100kW.
The trip was extremely comfortable, we had an overall consumption of 13.3kWh / 100km at motorway speeds. We’re really looking forward to our next long-distance trip with this car!
The only annoyance was the extremely fragmented charging cost structure with the various providers for which I didn’t always have the native app installed … which would result in situations as below where I would be billed 20 Euro Cents per minute after 20 minutes charging… WTF?
Driving a car is one thing, let’s look at the features and annoying things that make or break the experience:
What do we like about the car?
- MY SAFETY PERSO – OMG this is a game changer. Cars nowadays beep, boop, blink and nudge the steering wheel…or even hit the breaks on their own. With most cars, you have to dive into multiple menus to deactivate them one by one … only to have them reactivated when you start the car again. Super annoying and I definitely don’t like being nannied. Also, the system is not failsafe and warns sometimes without any real reason. In comes this life saver: Set or deactivate all the assistance systems once and save them as ‘your personal safety set’. When you get in the car, as per regulations, all the systems are active but a double button press on the MY SAFETY PERSO button activates your defined set and your car is … quiet! LOVE THIS FEATURE.
- A 10 minute charge gets you 30% battery charge at low SOC’s – it would be nice, if the throughput wouldn’t be reduced very quickly above 40% SOC
- It’s a fun little car – adequate acceleration, fun cornering
- Comfortable cruiser on longer trips (see above)
- Everyone is super positive about this car and especially the bright yellow color.
The only issues we’ve faced is a weird ‘dual identity’ of our open RLink system: the driver’s cockpit somehow falls back to Romanian whilst the main screen stays in English. This issue can be easily solved by changing the language to any other language and then back to English – a minor issue which I hope will be solved soon.
What could the car do better?
- Allow me to go to neutral and allow me to coast without requiring me to press the break – totally counterintuitive, dangerous and shows that the people here didn’t think this though
- Not force me to use the breaks when I’m clearly rolling to a stop and auto-activate the breaks at the very last moment to bring the car to a graceful stop (the R5 has automatic brakes … when the car is stationary, I’m talking about the last few metres where you are forced to touch the brakes ever so slightly when the regen stops working at below 2 km/h) – the FIAT 500e does this phenomenally well: zero use of the break pedal.
- During a quick charge keep the throughput high for longer
- Allow the definition of an SOC range when I want to charge when planning a trip – why does the built-in google planner want me to charge at 30+% SOC? This requires me to delete the next charge and define a new one. Battery conditioning only starts when a charging station is defined as an additional stop in the internal Google navigation system … which brings me very conveniently to:
- Allow the user to manually activate battery conditioning – let’s assume that after 5 years all Google services stop working, how can such conditioning be started if the planner doesn’t work anymore?
- No range prediction below 50km, come on Renault!
- Renault’s companion App could do with some UX flow optimisation, not show me a good part of the information in a happy Romanian / French mix
Overall: super happy with this purchase – but it will never, ever, replace the experience my TWIKE gives me.