I once read something about a study that found that when car geeks see a car, the parts of our brains normally used to recognize faces is activated, which is why so many of us can identify different types of cars so quickly. This part of our brain is extremely powerful, which may be at the root of amazing things like how many of us can see a car we’ve never seen before, and make shockingly good guesses as to its country of origin, era, and who built it. These are pretty subtle things, but they seem obvious and second-nature after a while. I felt that today when I saw a picture of a prototype Renault from the 1960s, Project 118.
Now, this is not a car I’d seen before; it never made it into production. This started as a design study for something roughly based on the Renault 4, but a bit larger and more up-market. Interestingly, Renault reached out to Ghia for the design work and building a prototype, based on the R4 platform/running gear.
Ghia made something that fit so well with the Renault design aesthetic that I immediately clocked it as a Renault, which is what got me thinking about all of this in the first place. Why did this immediately scream “Renault?”:
For a ton of reasons, a glance at this car, a car that I’ve never seen and was never even produced, somehow triggered in my brain all of the Renault cues. The car that this eventually became, the Renault 6, also feels very Renault, but somehow a bit less than this prototype.
So what exactly is it that makes my brain feel that Renaultitude? I think there’s a few visual cues that are key.
The rear I think holds a lot of answers. The angle of the back there, I’m not exactly sure why, but no one other than Renault would make the rear of the car at that angle – especially with that large C-pillar with the character line that angles the opposite way, to the rear. That is all, somehow, unmistakably Renault.
I mean, look at a later Renault 5 and you can still feel this car in it:
The semi-skirted, flattened-top rear wheel arch: that’s also wildly Renault. The rear that is slightly higher than the front? That’s not just Renault, that’s bigger, that’s French, because Citroën does that, too.
Also French is this interior:
No other country thinks of interiors like this: fun patterned upholstery over the simplest possible beach-chair-like tube-frame seats; a monospoke steering wheel; a crazy shifter that emerges from the dashboard; a combination of almost fanatical austerity but somehow wildly stylish – this is an interior that could have only come from France. And I could tell that within seconds of seeing this. It had to be either a Citroën or Renault.
This is a really charming little car, and especially in its oddly unadorned state, in that very neutral light gray, it sort of feels like the physical representation of general Renaultness, like some sort of platonic spirit-car that gets conjured up every time a designer sits down to design a new Renault.
Brains are amazing!
(photos: Renault Classic)
Which explains why I’m so bad at recognizing people I’ve only met a few times. That part of my brain is full of car “faces”.
I dunno, my first thought was Lada, but you are right about that interior.
Lada was described by its designers as a “Renault 5 put on a Land Rover chassis”. But there’s a lot of Fiat 128, particularly the shut line on the hood, and this has that shut line, so I’m sticking with Lada.
That last photo shows real avantime vibes in the C pillar
The character line on the C-pillar is also seems like it’s trying to refer to the slightly odd rear window shape on the 4, where the rear edge of the door window is canted rearwards, leaving an almost triangular window behind it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/1984_Renault_4_GTL%2C_front_left_%28Germany%29.jpg/1280px-1984_Renault_4_GTL%2C_front_left_%28Germany%29.jpg
On the other hand, there’s something very generically American about the grille.
https://www.oldcarsweekly.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTk3ODI4Njk1MjAzOTgxMTc0/1970-dodge-d100-adventurer-a079.webp
One thing i’ve learned from years of Jalop/Autopian reading:
It’s a real bummer we don’t get more french cars over here.
Yes. Especially with the deteriorating American roads in some places.
Call me recklessly extravagant but I prefer the steering wheels in my French cars to have two spokes:
https://live.staticflickr.com/5297/5556227829_95760f727b_z.jpg
I admit the Renault has a better upholstery pattern, though.
One spoke to rule them all!
Although by definition spokes radiate from a hub, so I don’t know if such a thing as a single spoke exists. Maybe this is a lever? Or maybe it’s a hinge?
It looked like a generic version of a car that might appear on a children’s stop motion animated show like Gumby.
That steering wheel and shifter are beyond horrible. Besides burning your hands after parking in the sun, it would feel like you are holding a piece of steel office/school furniture by the legs. And bending like a paperclip was probably their idea of safety.
I am sure that that is some sort of plastic with a steel core just like most other steering wheels from 1950 until whenever they started making them out of sponges. I can assure you that skinny steering wheels out in 100° sun do not burn your hands having grown up on a farm with lots of old John Deere and Ferguson tractors. Short pants on those steel tractor seats on the other hand…
Yes, I have that “face recognition“ ability for cars, and family and friends have poked fun at me for it ever since I was a little kid. I can’t help it! My father has it for planes – I can sort of tell you what most common planes are, but I have to actively think about it, unlike me with cars or him with planes. My mother seems to remember every little feature about someone and is able to describe them from memory – of course, their face, but much more too, after looking at them for about five seconds.
That interior is dope. The minimalism that is on trend now somehow is not as elegant. Although I would not want that steering wheel meeting my torso at high speed.
The interior is strongly French in styling and the single-spoke steering wheel tops it off. But the exterior styling cues made me think Eastern European/Soviet design. Probably something about the somewhat high ground clearance and character lines that are just off of “typical” car styling geometry somehow.
Yea, I was getting eastern European as well when I first looked at it.
Yes, looks like a Lada of because a Lada of looks like a R5, but with a Fiat 128 hood.
It looks Eastern Bloc because this prototype doesn’t try to be as appealing as possible at a superficial level. For better or worse, consumer products in a competitive market try to be as appealing as possible in addition to being functional and convenient. But it usually doesn’t take much effort or cost to make a functional product more attractive.
Well, it’s much more attractive than a current Lexus.
This looks like a Renault 4 with slightly straighter edges and a deleted 3rd window.
Looks like the automotive equivalent of the Pilsbury Doughboy.
When I was a child I was faceblind. I remembered people by their hairstyles. If you got your hair cut I didn’t know who you were. That’s still true to some degree.
But I could tell you the make and model of everything I saw on the road. Even cars people normally didn’t know about because of their obscurity. It’s gotten harder with the CUV’s reign of tyranny, but I’m still better at recognizing cars than people.
This is me too
I am sort of face, blind myself, funny thing for an artist,, but when I was living in New York City, it led to some pretty weird encounters.
I’ll be walking along and would encounter a celebrity, and celebrities are pretty thick on the ground in New York City, and they would sort of smile that yes you’ve recognized me smile. I of course, didn’t recognize them, but I also didn’t recognize people I knew so I assumed that a friend of mine had recognized me. Sometimes a high school reunion Who the hell is this person and do we know each other? conversation would ensue.
In the last few years, it’s become even worse, people keep mistaking me for somebody who’s famous so the conversations have gotten even weirder where random people come up and ask me for advice.
I can identify many (most?) cars. Not so much with faces. Apparently that part of my brain cannot multitask.
Me: “Did you see that a-hole in the seventh-generation Accord? What a tool!”
Wife: “You can’t tell what kind of car that is from this far away.”
Me: Catches up with Accord.
Wife: “How did you do that?”
Me: I could identify it because it looks like an Accord,
That shifter gives me feelings I haven’t felt in a while.
At the age of 3 when the 1959s came out I knew every car on the road, and many that weren’t. At 70, this is still true.
I have some degree of this in my brain, though mostly confined to cars sold in the US. There was a golden era in the mid-to-late ’70s, when my car geekdom first activated, when I could clock almost every American car down to the year by the changes in grille and lighting treatments. Then growing up started to demand more brain space, and cosmetic model-year changes became less of a thing, but my identification skills are still pretty good. Some day I’ll be a witness in a criminal case, and it will all be worthwhile.
Jim Trotter III: Does that mean that you can’t answer it?
Flyingstitch: It’s a bullshit question, it’s impossible to answer.
Jim Trotter III: Impossible because you don’t know the answer!
Flyingstitch: Nobody could answer that question!
The two utes….
El Camino and Ranchero! And Rampage. So three utes…
Yes, utes these days are hard to identify. They all look the same.
From the front, the Renault 6 looks a lot like a partially deflated Renault 16.
Which is not at all bad. I owned a 16 and loved it, though not particularly for its looks.
Until I read the word “Renault,” all I could see was Rivian R3.
The New 1963 Rivian R3.
I always thought Rivian’s logo was close to Renault’s, so design similarities would not shock me. The Rivian Van would be a decent Galion hommage
I see now why AMC and Renault merged – the Gremlin had the same rear slope and upside down cant to the rear side window glass.
Also looks a bit on the outside like the fictive alternate reality coorporation between Willy’s and Anadol, with a pinch of BMC 😉