• Cabin is full of delightful details
• Bright colours on offer
• Great quality – especially for the price

How is the quality and layout?

The Renault 5’s interior is a delight of quirky styling, appearing very much in line with the car’s overall endearing character. The bright upholstery colours help to accentuate this sense, and they pair well with the customisable interior ambient lighting. The 5’s cabin doesn’t ooze that last 10% of refinement like the BMW-built Mini Cooper Electric does, but it nonetheless feels properly assembled, and a little more expensive than the price tag would suggest. 

The upholstery fabric is soft and pleasant to the touch, the plastics don’t flex to any great extent nor do they rattle, and the aluminium door handles feel high-end while in your hand. There are some scratchy plastics – particularly in the rear – but they’re forgivable when juxtaposed next to so much quality. 

There’s plenty more to the interior than a neat design, however. Here’s what our New Cars Editor Alan Taylor Jones had to say: ‘[the interior] doesn’t just look great, it’s surprisingly usable, too. The manually adjustable driver’s seat offers enough range of movement that most drivers will feel at home straight away; rake- and reach-steering wheel adjustment, as well as electric lumbar adjustment, help with that.

‘Plus, there are physical air-con buttons, another proper button allowing you to save and quickly access your preferred settings for the safety assistance systems, and even buttons on top of the touchscreen for volume and for turning the screen off at night. 

‘It’s almost like Renault might have been listening to us moan about touchscreen dependence in cars, as the 5 is pleasingly ergonomic and not too reliant on in-screen menus to control everyday features, which we love.’

Infotainment and tech

The 5 E-Tech comes with a 10.1-inch central infotainment display as standard. It’s one of the easiest systems to navigate on the market, with large, easy to use buttons. The infotainment software is an openR link system, and so features Google services including Maps, Assistant and Google Play all baked in.

The size of the display feels just right in the cabin, as does the 10.0-inch digital instrument display on Techno cars and up. The latter is customisable so you have choice over the data presented to you alongside the car’s speedometer. 

Vehicle-to-load (V2L) technology is available on the 5, which means that you can charge other electrical devices from the car’s high voltage battery. It’ll also support vehicle-to-grid (V2G) when that’s available (perhaps in 2025), so that you can power your house from the Renault 5’s battery – provided you’ve got a home charger that can support bi-directional charging.

Comfort

• Decent support from the seats
• Quality upholstery throughout
• Space in the rear is tight

The seats in our most recent test car were trimmed in a rather fetching yellow fabric. The texture didn’t have that nasty scratchiness like some cheaper trim upholsteries cradle you in, but was instead pleasant to the touch.

The seats themselves have a soft springiness to them that did well to ward off fatigue. The ample adjustability and electric lumbar support certainly helped in finding the perfect position up front, though the lack of space was still a limiting factor when trying to get comfortable on the back row.