Renault Twizy Review: Clean, Green, Smart… And We Can’t Have It
What’s hot: Fantastic fun, as ‘green’ as a lentil burger, has a roof and seatbelts (unlike a scooter).
What’s not: It can’t be registered... yet. (Time to wake up your local member).
X-FACTOR: Our regulators clearly haven’t recognised it, but here, in the Twizy, is the future of urban personal transport.
Engine/trans: 13kW/57Nm Synchronous AC electric motor | 1spd auto
Fuel consumption: 0.0 l/100km
OVERVIEW
Just been driving the Renault Twizy. It’s electric, seats two line-astern, has a maximum range of 80km and is as unusual and appealing as is its name.
It’s appealing for a whole bunch of reasons.
One, it’s fun to drive. Doesn’t matter that it’s never going to hit highway speeds - it’s for the cut and thrust of innercity streets - and is zippy in the way a small scooter is zippy.
Two, it’s electric, incredibly efficient, and has the tiniest of tiny environmental footprints. It takes just 3.5 hours to fully charge on a 10amp plug.
And three, a point that is clearly not apparent to some (as in ‘some’ in Government service), is how friggin’ sensible this little machine is.
Imagine if vehicles like this - of this size, and with this tiny green EV footprint - were running round our city streets.
Imagine if they began to replace the herds of commuting SUVs and MPVs and hatchbacks and sedans turning roads into gluepots every morning and evening.
And imagine, if you can, that we had governments and regulators and road planners with the wit to recognise that in vehicles like Renault’s Twizy are solutions.
How much pressure would be lifted from existing road infrastructure if commuters in numbers drove such vehicles?
Perhaps, it’s entirely possible, we would not then need more roads after all, and we’d discover that there are other answers to fixing a roads system that seems forever always five years behind.
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