Renault Vesta II

As you may have guessed, I absolutely adore fully-functioning prototypes. 

This particular car goes even harder than most — complete with a side quest you probably haven’t heard before — so read on. 

Concept cars are cool and all, but to me, drivable prototypes, like this Renault Vesta II, are where it’s at. 

Why would Renault devote millions of dollars to building such an advanced prototype that it will never produce? With enough publicity, the vehicle may reflect well on other vehicles in the range. 

Important are the lessons learned by constructing a vehicle that's a few years (or decades…) beyond what's already out there, until you remember that every corporation produces enough employee churn to ensure that the right people are either in their jobs for too long…or not long enough.

Vesta is not only a large asteroid in our solar system but she's also the Roman goddess of the hearth, home, and family. (I don't understand why Roman goddesses are depicted as virgins, but whatever.) Renault says it embodies the spirit of the latter, but its name is really just an acronym for Véhicule Econome de Systèmes et Technologies Avancées. It’s VESTA, bitch.

In the mid-'80s, the French government issued a challenge for automakers to design and construct a vehicle capable of using fewer than 3 L/100 km (78 US MPG) of fuel while traveling between 90 km/h (56 mph) and 120 km/h (75 mph). 

(Some say that research leading to the Vesta cars began in the 1970s, to which I can speculate: probably. Automakers research and do design mock-ups for many vehicles that never see the light of day, and every major producer at that time was looking into fuel-saving technologies.)

What I like most about the Renault Vesta series is that the prototype cars are designed to do normal highway speeds and save huge amounts of fuel, while providing an equal amount of performance and interior space to the a conventional Renault 5. 

Renault began with Vesta 1, then Vesta +, and finally the Vesta II.

Unlike much of the fuel-saving tech promoted today, the Vesta II didn't rely on cheap tricks like fuel injection or auto stop-start systems to sneak under efficiency bars that governments have set. 

This is obvious, right? If you want great fuel economy, it has to be baked into the DNA of the vehicle. It took Renault as many as nine Vesta prototypes to get it right — though as you’ll learn, perhaps its downfall is that it was too feasible.

The Cd of Vesta II is 0.186, bettering even the General Motors EV-1 and much later Volkswagen XL-1. 

Unlike either, the Vesta II retains four seats, with bodywork comprised of a mix of metal, composites, and plastics; its windows are just 2 millimetres thick, and only the driver’s window opens!

Active aerodynamics to manage airflow around the engine, plus a full underbody help its impressive low-drag shape, as does its air suspension that automatically lowers by 20 millimetres at three set speeds.

Under the hood is a carbureted(!) 716-cc three cylinder engine with 27 horsepower. This may sound depressing, but its light weight of 473 kg (1,042 lbs) allowed members of the press to hit 138.2 km/h (85 mph). On their test drives.

Yes — members of the press. I know there are a few public relations professionals and car company employees who read these stories, so let me put this tidbit in your heads: on a run from Bordeaux to Paris with a writer on board, Vesta II used just 1.94 L/100 km (121 US mpg), a new world record at the time.

Did any of the lessons learned with this car filter into the rest of the Renault range? 

No, not really. And that's a shame.

Now for the kicker: Greenpeace activists agree with me.

Six years after Vesta II made its record-setting runs in 1987, the Renault Vesta II was unveiled at the 1993 Frankfurt International Car Show…by Greenpeace. I know this because Greenpeace still has photos of it up on its website.

If anyone is in the know about what exactly happened, please get in touch, however period reports state that French activists members of Greenpeace ‘liberated’ the Vesta II from the Renault Museum. These activists could have been employees of Renault, sure, however it doesn’t change the coordinated effort of the activist organization to steal a prototype car and spend months actively touring it around to multiple events(!)

First, it appeared in Frankfurt. Then, at the Brussels Autoworld Museum in Belgium, inside of a cube van with transparent sides. 

Later that year, it was seen in Bern, Switzerland — then toured around Germany, parked in front of a few factories — including BMW and Ford ones.

Finally, in early 1994 Vesta II was shown at Munich Auto Fair "Auto '94” in Hall 2 in a wooden cage — after which I believe it was repatriated back to Renault’s care in France.

I feel that as long as nobody was hurt and Renault’s property wasn’t severely damaged, well done to Greenpeace. Any corporate embarrassment or cost should have been readily absorbed by the hundreds of thousands of production models it was selling at the time.

I hesitate to think of how many times I’ve thought of doing the same — including to many of the fuel-efficient cars on this website — liberating a little friend-shaped teardrop car just so that I could drive it around and tell people about how impressive some prototypes are. 

To me, it’s nothing but flattering when even environmental activist organizations are committing crimes in order to market an automaker’s prototype products on its behalf.

Having Greenpeace abduct a prototype and promote it as a viable product is as close as an automaker will get to hearing environmentally-sensitive people saying, “BUILD THIS CAR, WE LOVE IT! GREAT JOB!!”

You can’t buy that kind of good PR.