Renault Rafale 300hp 4x4 Review: Who Is It For?

Why should you care about the Renault Rafale? Isn’t it just another of the strange breed of ‘coupe’ crossovers that serve as cheat codes allowing manufacturers to charge people more for a less practical car?

Well, yes. But there are a couple of reasons you might be interested in this, the 4x4 plug-in hybrid Atelier Alpine version. Firstly, its 296bhp peak power makes it the joint-most powerful road car Renault has ever made, tied with the last Megane RS Trophy. And secondly, Renault’s talking a fairly big game about its sportiness.

So, if this is to now serve as the sporty flagship of the Renault range rather than a spicy Megane, can it actually feel like a hot hatch?

Well, Renault would rather you liken it not to the three-wheeling Clios and Meganes of yore, but to some of the slightly esoteric sports saloons in its back catalogue – stuff like the 21 Turbo and Safrane Biturbo. This might be more of a clue to what it’s actually like.

That peak of 296bhp comes from – count ’em – four power sources: a 1.2-litre turbocharged inline-three with 148bhp drives the front wheels along with a 69bhp electric motor. A second e-motor on the rear axle makes it four-wheel drive and contributes 134bhp, and there’s also a starter-generator motor throwing another 34bhp into the mix. Add everything up and you also get 320lb ft of torque, but that’s apparently not the cumulative total.

The gearbox is equally complicated – it’s a four-speed auto but with two additional speeds for the electric motors, essentially giving you a six-speed.

While the way it deploys its power may confound a generation used to ‘engine, gearbox, driven wheels’, the resulting figures are easy enough to understand. 0-62mph happens in a spritely 6.4 seconds, though top speed is a more sedate 111mph.

Still, acceleration is what matters more in the real world, and the Rafale 300hp feels every bit as quick as that figure suggests. With all the power sources working together, it takes off with lots of low-end shove and keeps gaining speed steadily until you’re at the national limit.

The chassis promises much, too. This top Atelier Alpine version gets four-wheel steering and a self-adjusting suspension setup that scans the road ahead, and it’s all been set up by engineers from Renault’s Alpine performance division. They make the phenomenal A110, so they know what they’re doing.

Then again, the A110 is a 1100kg mid-engined sports car. The Rafale is a 1980kg plug-in hybrid SUV, and it shows. You can take corners with commitment – it’ll hold its line impressively, responding to little adjustments, and that clever suspension does a very good job of cancelling out body roll. It’s genuinely quick cross-country, but fun? That’s another story.

The steering, for instance, offers very little feedback and is overly light, even when artificially weighted up in Sport mode. There’s quite a bit of dead travel in the brake pedal before you get any real high-speed stopping power (although the Rafale does a very good job of swapping between physical brakes and regen). 

There’s not even much in the way of noise – surely, if Renault’s truly pitching this as a sporty SUV, even something artificially piped in would be preferable to what you actually get, which is mostly road noise from the massive 21-inch wheels underscored by the odd coarse grumble from the engine.

Still, even though the Rafale 300hp is wearing its Alpine involvement on its sleeve, it’s probably unfair to go into expecting a serious driver’s car. If you wind things back, there’s plenty to commend it on.

The interior, for example, is lightyears ahead of where Renault was not that long ago. It feels properly posh in here – easily as good as anything VW is doing these days, and far more sensibly laid out. You get a Google-powered infotainment system (nice, although you’ll still just end up mirroring your phone), heated and powered everything, and best of all, a ‘My Safety’ button that requires two quick presses to take you to your desired ADAS settings. Bliss.

The seats are big and cushy, there’s lots of room front and back, and the suspension strikes a nice balance between not being overly firm and not wallowing around like an old Cadillac. Space is abundant, mainly because the Rafale is a deceptively massive car, although your dog probably won’t thank you for the way the sloping roof eats into boot space.

It cruises about in relative serenity, only interrupted if you have to wake the engine up around town, where it can sound and feel a bit rough and clattery at first.

As a PHEV, you get a laughable official MPG figure of 565, but away from WLTP testing fantasyland, I was managing a respectable 37-ish. That was with some spirited drives too, and often with the e-motors only charged by what the regen could provide.

In top Atelier Alpine trim – which you need for the fancy dynamic suspension – the Rafale starts at £49,695, and there’s no two ways around it: that’s a lot for a Renault, even one as nice as the Rafale is inside.

There is a solution, though – don’t buy this one. The Rafale also comes as a non-plug-in, front-wheel drive hybrid with 197bhp. If you can wrap your head around the whole coupe-SUV thing (and to be honest, we still can’t), that’ll probably be a perfectly lovely daily.

We’re struggling, though, to figure out who this 300hp PHEV is for. Yes, it’s genuinely quick, but it’s no fully-fledged Alpine product. It’s too sporty for people who just want a stylish fastback SUV thing, and not sporty enough for people mourning the demise of the Megane RS. It’s not a bad car by any means – just one that probably didn’t need to exist.