ROAD TEST

AUTOCAR ROAD TEST No 5545

It may look like a replacement for the ageing Kadjar, but all is not what it seems

PHOTOGRAPHY OLGUN KORDAL

MODEL TESTED E-TECH HYBRID 145 S-EDITION

Price £28,600 Power 141bhp Torque na 0-60mph 11.0sec 30-70mph in fourth na Fuel economy 50.8mpg CO 2 emissions 108g/km 70-0mph 56.9m

T he one sure-fire way to create a best-in-class car is to invent a whole new class of car altogether.The original Mercedes CLS did it as a four-door coupé; the Nissan Juke did it as a B-segment SUV; and those are just two obvious examples. Now, if you’re looking for a crossover-coupé with a slice of added desirability that’s bigger than the B-segment but not quite big enough for the C-segment, along comes the Renault Arkana.

Few people will define their next smaller family car in quite such specific terms, of course, and if you’re not that fussed about the Arkana’s sloping-roof SUV styling, you have many alternatives to choose from.

Cars like the aforementioned Nissan Juke and Renault’s own Captur will be cheaper, but they give up some interior room. Up the budget by a few thousand pounds and you can get into a more upmarket SUV like a Hyundai Tucson or Nissan Qashqai.

To find out whether it represents a new ideal compromise of outright size and interior space for the crossover breed, or is just a muddle of disparate cues and inf luences, the Arkana now undergoes our full road test. At the same time, we find out whether the E-Tech hybrid powertrain works as well as a full hybrid as it did in plug-in hybrid form in the Mégane we tested last month.

DESIGN AND ENGINEERING

The Arkana may have a familiar Renault family face but its side profile is less recognisable and distinctive. As more than one tester observed, there are clear hints of BMW X4 to its looks from certain angles.

Its origin story only adds to the confusion. Renault has sold an Arkana model in Russia since 2019, and while that car looks very similar on the outside to the one we get, its more Dacia-grade interior betrays the fact that it was based on the older Dacia Duster platform.

‘Our’ Arkana is in fact a stretched Captur underneath. And as a result of its more modern platform and fresher component set, the European Arkana should ride and handle with reasonable sophistication. It uses a torsion beam rear axle just as the current Captur and Clio do, which might discourage some, but that fact doesn’t prevent those sibling cars from competing dynamically at the top of their respective classes.

Given the Arkana’s relationship with the smaller Captur, you might expect it to be built alongside its sibling model in Valladolid, Spain. However, it is instead manufactured by Renault-Samsung in Busan, South Korea, where it has been marketed as the Samsung XM3 since last year.