RENAULT SCENIC, 1991
We know not to hope for too much from a concept car that makes it into production, don’t we? After all these years we’ve been conditioned to it. Expectation versus reality and all that.
Take the 1996 Renault Megane Scenic, for example. It was itself an innovative car – it invented a whole new segment and started the compact MPV craze. Not too many cars around that can boast of anything like that. But the 1991 concept version, revealed at the Frankfurt Motor Show, promised something that would have knocked your socks off and even given you somewhere useful to store them.
The concept car was designed by the Renault team headed by Patrick le Quément, but built for the French carmaker by the Italian coachbuilder Coggiola, which also knocked together the Megane concept in 1988. That car also had quadruple sliding doors and looked nothing at all like the final production version, it was more like the grandfather of the Laguna and the Avantime.
And of course we all love a wacky French car, even if we’re not prepared to actually buy one. It’s encouraging to know that they exist, and the Scenic concept definitely swam in the same gene pool. It featured quadruple sliding doors, the likes of which we’ve never seen on a production car, front and rear sliding in opposite directions to create a cavernous hole in the side of the car into which you could throw entire families and all the possessions you might need for an intense summer holiday.
Cameras instead of wing mirrors, though – that was space age tech back in 2001.
The car also featured a sandwich floor idea, which would later see production on the 1997 Mercedes A-Class – the idea that you could jam loads of the car’s mechanical and electronic bits between two slices of metal to create more space in the cabin. Of course, that chunky section at the bottom of the Scenic concept is definitely more double-decker club sandwich than a petite ham and mayonnaise number. It meant you could fit a family of five and all that stuff in a more compact footprint than ever before. An Espace to fit in your backpack.
Add to that seat-mounted belts, swivelling front seats and sliding rear ones, built-in child restraints – it all added up to a versatile family wagon that actually delivered on what drivers wanted from a car, rather than telling people how they should live.
At least it would have actually delivered had it gone into production like this. Like we said, the Megane Scenic was an innovative, flexible, clever family car that still influences cars today. Just don’t tell anyone who bought it what they could have won.