Renault has officially unveiled the Kwid, the small crossover its hoping will do well in emerging markets, and it looks nothing like the concept.
When the French automaker unveiled that concept back in 2014, we were promised funky colours, space age materials, tyres that appeared to belong to a monster truck and an interior inspired by a bird’s nest.
No ad to show here.
What we have instead is a pretty standard crossover, in pretty standard colours, built from pretty standard materials (Renault didn’t even keep the drone it was supposed to come with).
There are however a few nods to the fact that people now obsess about their cars in the same way they do their gadgets. There’s a navigation-cum-multimedia system complete with large seven-inch touchscreen display and Bluetooth connectivity.
The most important factor however appears to be affordability. On that front, the alliance between Renault and Nissan is incredibly important as it’s allowed Renault to build the Kwid on a platform common to both manufacturers.
The KWID will be launched in India in the second half of 2015, where Renault has some serious expectations for it. In fact, it’s got some serious expectations of India as a whole, having launched five cars from that country in the past few years.
Still, we can’t help but think that things would have been a little more exciting if it looked more like this:
