CarBrandLogos archive · Renault · 1990
Renault stopped using numbers, and built its best-selling car in the process.
Discover the storyPhoto: © M 93 · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Renault Clio, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
Replacing the Renault 5 meant replacing a car people were fond of, so Renault changed the terms. The Clio arrived in 1990 with a name instead of a number, a rounder and more grown-up body, and an emphasis on ride comfort and cabin quality that pushed it upmarket of the supermini norm. It won European Car of the Year for 1991, and the Clio III repeated that in 2006, a rare double for one nameplate.
2001 Renault Sport Clio 3-door hatchback 01 · OSX · Public domain
02
In Britain it was sold on a long-running advertising campaign built around a young woman and her father and their mutual, unspoken deceptions, which did more for Renault's image than any technical claim. Elsewhere it simply sold, becoming Renault's highest-volume model and staying in production across five generations and more than three decades.
2001 Renault Sport Clio 3-door hatchback · Jeremy from Sydney, Australia · CC BY 2.0
03
The fast versions did the rest of the work. The Clio Williams of 1993 was a homologation special with a 2.0-litre engine and a wider track, and it established Renault Sport as a maker of small cars that could embarrass sports cars on a back road. Then came the Clio V6, which took the mid-engined logic of the old 5 Turbo, dropped a V6 where the rear seats had been, and made a short, twitchy, wide-hipped thing that was more spectacle than tool. The mainstream Renaultsport Clios that followed were among the best-handling front-drive cars of their era.
1998 Renault Clio Grande 1.2 Rear · Makizox · CC BY-SA 4.0
04
The Clio remains in production, now with hybrid power, still built in France, Turkey and Slovenia, and still the car that pays for Renault's more interesting ideas.
At a glance
Produced
1990–presentBody
3-door hatchbackTechnical specification
Badge at launch
This is the marque emblem that accompanied the Clio's era. The full identity timeline is documented in the brand archive.
Explore the logo history →From the journal
Lineage
Contemporaries from the 1990s
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