Little Toy Blue

With governments around the world looking to ban petrol cars, could Renault’s 454bhp electric Zoe be a sign of hot hatches to come?

- Steve Sutcliffe

ON THE ONE HAND, YOU can’t help but gravitate towards even just the idea of a 454bhp hot hatch. Especially one that rides on 20in wheels and tyres that do their utmost to burst out from under a quartet of quite magnificently blistered wheelarches.

But on the other hand, when you realise that said hot hatch is actually just a concept car that will never, claim its creators, see the light of day in terms of production, you can’t help wondering why on earth they went to so much bother. Why put so much effort and skill and design savvy into a project that will never turn a wheel on the public road? Why, damn it, don’t they just make the Zoe e-Sport then bask in the glory that it would unquestionably attract?

Answer: because Renault has a rich history of giving us mad but deeply sexy concept cars – Espace F1, Twizy F1, Trezor, etc – most of which never stand a chance of making production. The deliciously pumped-up e-Sport is merely the most recent of these, but it does still serve a purpose beyond making petrolheads go weak at the knees just because of the way it looks (and the way it goes, more on which in a bit).

Technically, if not visually, the e-Sport provides a  glimpse into the future regarding what might be possible in a hot hatch in, say, six years. Its twin electric motors – one for each axle – and 450kg lithium-ion battery are technologies developed directly from Renault’s highly successful Formula E campaign. So it’s not as if Renault had to start from scratch with the car’s underpinnings, even if they did have to be packaged in a very different way compared with a single-seater Formula E car.