Paris 2010: Renault Dezir Concept

The French seem to revel and specialize in the bizarre and unexplainable when it comes to cars. It seems to be their USP, if you will.  Citroens with single-spoke steering wheels and bizarre hydropneumatic spheres for suspension.  Peugeots with giant gaping-maw grilles and 8-foot-long noses.  Renault hatchbacks with powerful engines stuffed where the rear seats used to go, driving the rear wheels through massive boxed-out fenders.  So of course their concept cars are equally bizarre, perhaps just for the sake of being bizarre.  It seems at every major European auto show, one of the french manufacturers debuts an impossibly exotic mid-engined sports car that runs on cheese and Galois cigarettes, or has a jet engine sticking out of one tail light, or god knows what.

Continuing that tradition is the Renault Dezir concept which debuted at this year's Paris International Auto Show.  Clock all the absolute bizarreness that abounds in this slice of French oddity.  Exibit A:

This pretty young woman is undoubtedly asking "Sir, why do these doors open in this dimension that doesn't exist in nature?  I am confused.  Are we trapped in an MC Escher painting?"  Yes, let's have doors that open into a black hole in the space-time continuum, sort of out and up and in and backwards a bit.  Sounds great.

"Oui," said Jacques.  "Let us carefully craft the seats to look like sun-bleached bananas that have been attacked with an axe.  Tres bon."  I don't get it.  Maybe that's the whole point?  Why is the steering wheel approximately 8 feet deep?  Why not?

And let us not forget the aluminum side-spar (hello, Audi R8!) that's perforated with "speed holes."  Or the Renault badge that seems to be growing out of the front bumper like a malignant tumor.  Or the shades of Ford GT40 about the whole vehicle.  When the aliens finally come to attack the earth, they'll arrive in one of these.  Sexy, chic, fashion-conscious aliens.

Still, it's sexy in a sort of scary way.  It's about as traditional as Christian Nordic Death-Metal.  Which I'm sure exists somewhere.  Sadly, the fascination pretty much ends there.  It's got the skin that looks like a space ship made babies with Tron, but underneath it's... another blasted electric car.  The illusion comes crashing to a halt.

For those that are still interested, here's the details: the electric motor creates approximately 150 horsepower and 166 lb-ft of torque, when the numbers you were expecting were... well, it's French, so ?^pi sounds about right for horsepower, and probably an imaginary number for torque.  Renault says it will do the 0-60 sprint in under 5 seconds, which would have been exciting in 1992, but a $25,000 Subaru or Mazda will do that, and they're boring 5-door hatchbacks with engines that run on gas, and they're not made out of hopes and dreams.  C'mon, Renault, why not something crazy?  Like Jaguar's concept car, with 4 electric motor and two micro gas turbine engines for range generators?  Why not say it's powered by the sun?

Still, it's refreshing to see that the French haven't lost their sense of humor - and their stylists haven't lost their steady supply of LSD - in today's car-unfriendly atmosphere.  I just wish it had rocket launchers and a Flux Capacitor so it could travel back in time.