Renault’s model history is rather a bipolar thing – its products can be extremely mundane, the kind of fare that used to be dismissed as Euroboxes, or they can be attention-grabbing, maverick and stylistically innovative like the madcap 5 Turbo which burst into 1980 with its lunatic blown engine mounted amidships, gorging on air sucked through huge vents in massively-distended wheelarches, or the Twingo which looked like no microcar I had ever seen. I was in France for a while the year after the Twingo launched, and my girlfriend and I wanted badly to take one back to Britain.
Four years later the Mégane appeared, and I took literally no notice of it at all.
