The Twingo is the modern day Renault 5

SOMETIMES you can have too much technology for your own good.

Take my mobile, for instance, which for the past few days has been at the menders, looking sorry for itself. The smartypants smartphone in question has more computing power than an Apollo Moon mission, the ability to upload any of the thousands of photographs it’s taken to Facebook in an instant AND the ability to phone home. Yet all it took to render its armada of tech completely useless was a hairline crack in the screen.

That’s why I’ve done the mobile phone equivalent of getting a courtesy car while the Lexus is being repaired – and entrusted the job to a phone I bought brand new for a tenner. I might have gone back 15 years but there’s something hugely fun about having a bargain basement phone whose luxuries stop at an FM-only radio, a torch, and the ability to go three days – not a couple of hours – without running out of juice. Imagine if you could have that frills-free fun factor in a car!

Happily, the automotive answer to the £10 mobile is alive and well – and no, it’s not the Dacia Sandero I was hoping – but didn’t – to discover it in last year. I’d suggest looking to Renault – Dacia’s parent company, don’t forget – and its new Twingo.

It couldn’t be more different from its predecessor if it tried – while that car was front-engined, front-wheel-drive and not all that exciting to look at, the new one’s shoved a tiny little three cylinder engine in the boot and has the rounded cuteness of a newly-born Pug.

Inside, it’s all big dials, bright colours and not much else. You can spec it up with a tablet-style multimedia system with voice control and DAB radio but that’s missing the point – if it’s big car luxuries in a little package, you might as well as go for the downsized Golf ambience you get in a Volkswagen Up. The Twingo’s fun comes from its flyweight feel – it’ll feel a bit thrashier on the motorway, but around town and on tight, twisty roads it’s big fun.

Anyone who loved the old Renault 5 – and I should know, I used to run around in one – will appreciate the old car’s focus on fun and function lives on in the new Twingo. It is that rare thing – a small car that isn’t pretending to be an executive express in half the length.

I’d happily have a Twingo for the same reason I’m quite attached to my £10 phone. It’s got all the fun you need, and all the clutter you don’t.

Why I can't wait to test the new Renault Twingo

RENAULT’S Twingo has soared straight to the top of the list of cars I’d most like to drive this year. Even though at least one of my petrolhead pals reckons it’ll be a little bit rubbish.

The argument goes that the Twingo, after 20 years of being resolutely French in its insistence on having a front-mounted engine powering the front wheels, is now a rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive car. Just like the Volkswagen Beetle your grandparents used to drive 35 years ago.

The prosecution also moans that the reason why the new car has its engine stuffed into the boot is because it’s based on the Smart – a city car not exactly renowned for its brilliant handling – and that as a result, there are no plans whatsoever for a Renaultsport hot hatch version. The new Twingo, therefore, will be a slovenly supermini that’s too tall to go around to go around corners properly with its engine in the wrong place.

None of which matters, because the Twingo’s baby brother is also afflicted by being too tall and having its engine in the wrong place. The electrically-powered Twizy, however, is one of the gems of Renault’s range. Look at a Twizy and you’d probably just laugh – it’s far too narrow, it has flimsy struts instead of doors to protect its two occupants, and it maxes out at just 45mph.

Drive one, however, and you’ll discover that it’s a mid-engined, rear-wheel drive car with skinny little tyres and a chassis set up by Renaultsport, who also did the wonderful Clio Williams and the race-bred Spyder. As a result what looks like a Government disability car for the new millennium will drift for England if you ask it to. It is utterly brilliant to drive.

 In fact, I’ll go further than that – it’s the only electric car I’ve ever actively wanted to buy with my own money, and seriously thought about saving up for until I learned you have to lease the batteries separately. To me, that’s a bit like buying the house of your dreams only to learn you have to rent the living room separately.

The new Twingo, with its four seats and its proper petrol engine which comes free with the rest of the car, has every opportunity to be similarly smile-inducing to drive without costing you a fortune in fuel and speeding tickets.

If anyone at Renault is reading this, count me in for a test drive!

The old Renault 5, not the new one, is the perfect car for Cameron's Britain

TORIES and Liberal Democrats, look away now. The buzzword I’ve heard most since the establishment of Cameron’s Britain is “austerity”.

Blame who you like but austerity is everywhere, from the library that shut down six months ago to the vacant shops dotting the town centres. The TV screens are awash with anarchic imagery of Greek people burning things and news correspondents looking confused, unsure of which political party or city banker to blame it all on. Everyone knows these are austere times. Except Renault.

The French, you see, are reckoning on a reinvention of the iconic Renault 5 as a way to light up the supermini market in the way the latest Clio and Twingo haven’t, but they’re making the mistake of tilting it squarely at the Citroen DS3. This, in Cameron’s Britain, is a mistake.

I like to think I know a bit about the Renault 5 because I owned one and absolutely loved it. While the fact my very ropey Campus model cost just £100 helped, it really was the archetypal austerity car. Due to the fact it came with absolutely no equipment at all the engineering effort went into making sure the few bits you did get worked perfectly, and even after 120,000 miles it still started on the button every single time. I suspected it’d survive everything up to and including a light nuclear blast.

It was also much, much quicker than an ancient 1.4 hatchback had any right to be and easily the most spacious car I’ve owned. Both, I suspect, down to there being absolutely nothing in the way of luxuries to weigh it down or clutter it up. Prison cells come better equipped these days than the old 5 did.

But the new one, if predictions are right, won’t be a car for peasants and paupers, but a posh one with all sorts of unnecessarily bourgeois equipment like cruise control and electric windows and central locking. In the old one, you were lucky if you got a working heater!

What Cameron’s Britain of spending cuts and soaring unemployment needs isn’t a Renault 5 that’s weighed down with pricey electrical equipment that’ll only break anyway. It needs a real replacement for the old warhorse, which offers cash-strapped families a five star Euro NCAP safety rating – another Renault tradition, don’t forget – and absolutely nothing else so that they too can afford a brand new car.

Then again, even if Renault does bring out a new and rather more decadent reinvention of the 5 it won’t reach us until at least 2014. Maybe they know something about an economic recovery the rest of us don’t?