The Renault 5 Turbo 3E Is A 533bhp Retro Electric Drift Machine

Usually, when a car company wants to build something niche, limited production and geared expressly towards enthusiasts, it falls at the first hurdle when the accounting team hits the engineering team with a reality check. That wasn’t an issue for the Renault 5 Turbo 3E, though – it was Renault head honcho Luca de Meo that gave the go ahead.

This is not the sort of car mass market manufacturers like Renault can normally justify building. It has a bespoke aluminium chassis clothed in a new carbon body that only shares three parts with the regular Renault 5 E-Tech – the windscreen, door mirrors and rear lights. It’s the first production EV with in-wheel motors, something that’s long been one of the next big things in electric powertrains.

And yet Renault’s only building 1980 of them as a glorious retro throwback, and is keeping shtum on whether any of this doubtless massively expensive engineering will filter down into mass-production cars. Like the Clio V6 was 25 years ago, this is Renault giving its engineers carte blanche to do something that’s designed to be nothing other than jolly good fun.

The specs – assuming you’re on board with the electric powerplant – are tantalising. Its two electric motors are integrated into each rear wheel hub, allowing them to be lightweight, compact and responsive, and control power delivery to the wheels with millimetric precision.

They develop an estimated 268bhp a piece, with peak combined power sitting somewhere around 533bhp. By cheekily quoting the absolute peak they can make, Renault puts the total torque figure at 3540lb ft. The reality will be a lot less than that, but it should still deliver plenty more twist than your average cordless drill.

Thanks to that aluminium chassis and carbon skin, the targeted weight is a lithe-for-an-EV 1450kg. While proper figures are still a long way off being homologated, Renault is estimating a 0-62mph time of under 3.5 seconds and a top speed of 168mph. If not the top speed, that acceleration puts it right up there in supercar territory – Renault name-dropped the McLaren Artura and Ferrari Roma during its presentation.

All these hugely impressive numbers are academic, though, because just look at it. An update of the wide-hipped, mid-engined Renault 5 Turbo homologation special of the 1980s, it’s 4.08 metres long and 2.03 metres wide – in other words, half as wide as it is long. While the looks are inspired by the ’80s, they’ve been updated in a fun way – one of those ‘vents’ set into the massive rear haunches, for instance, conceals the charging port.

With all that power going to the back wheels in such a stumpy little streetfighter, it should be lively. It’ll come with four drive modes, including a track setting and a dedicated drift mode that’ll tutor drivers on how to do big, impressive skids with the enormous wand-like drift handbrake in the cabin.

That’s not the only impressive thing about the interior. Up front, there are two big carbon bucket seats with six-point harnesses, and in the back, in the fine tradition of rear-drive Renault hot hatches, no seats. Unlike in the original 5 Turbo and Clio V6, though, there are no powertrain gubbins filling that space – with a flat battery pack and those wheel-mounted motors, what you actually get is a really big boot.

The screen is taken from the regular 5 but gets a bespoke UI, while the steering wheel is borrowed from the Alpine A290, with its big red ‘OV’ overboost button. This debut spec has a funky tartan dash, but the interior trim – like the exterior colour scheme – will be pretty much infinitely customisable.

Now, as wonderful as all this sounds, this is still a small electric Renault hatchback, and so we must touch on the boring stuff. The 5 Turbo 3E has a 70kWh battery pack, good for an estimated WLTP figure of 249 miles. Yeah, nobody’s getting anything close to that, are they? It’ll also be the first Renault EV to benefit from an 800V electrical architecture, which should hugely speed up the charging process.

You get four levels of brake regen, and because it shares its operating system with the normal 5, a Google Maps-powered EV route planner. That’ll be handy when you drain the battery after 10 minutes of tyre-shredding doughnuts. It’ll even have vehicle-to-load capability, should you find yourself with a small fridge that needs powering.

What you won’t find anywhere are any Alpine badges. While that name took over from Renaultsport a couple of years ago as Renault’s in-house performance brand, and Alpine developed the Turbo 3E, it’s been badged as a Renault to reflect the performance hierarchy of the original car. In the ’80s there was the common-or-garden Renault 5, warmed-over 5 Alpine and full three-chillis 5 Turbo, and in the 2020s there’ll be the 5 E-Tech, Alpine A290 and 5 Turbo 3E.

In fact, peep the logos of the supposedly defunct Renaultsport brand in this car’s windows – supposedly, the Turbo 3E is a ‘tribute’ to the sub-brand that brought us so many sublime hot hatches earlier this century.

You want one, don’t you? Renault will build 1980 of them – a nod to the year the original 5 Turbo launched. It’ll be sold across Europe, plus in several markets with strong hot Renault brand loyalty – Japan, Australia and the Middle East. Pricing hasn’t been confirmed yet, but Renault says it’ll be a good chunk less than the average modern supercar – we’re thinking somewhere around £200,000.

At any rate, it’s an exciting enough prospect for a couple of hundred people to have started nagging Renault about an allocation when the Turbo 3E was little more than some pretty computer renders at the tail end of last year. Orders will open any day now, with the first cars hitting the road in 2027. Hopefully, by then, the production Hyundai N Vision 74 will have arrived too for the coolest EV twin test ever.