Renault Twingo Gordini | Shed of the Week
Where have all the dirt-cheap small cars gone, you ask? Shed to the rescue...
What’s the cheapest new car in the UK right now? If you don’t count the Citroen Ami – which Shed doesn’t because it’s not legally a car – or anything electric like the Dacia Spring or Leapmotor – which Shed automatically discounts because he’s a miserable Luddite – the answer to this question is the Dacia Sandero, at prices beginning below £15k. To Shed, who remembers when Minis with string-pull doorhandles cost about five hundred quid new, £15k is a mad amount of money for a car and the reason why he only buys pre-loved ones.
Those first Minis were gobbled up in the early '60s by skint post-war UK working class types who up to that point had been getting soaked on BSA motorbikes, or combinations if you had a family. Slightly better off folk could choose to be jangled about in three-wheeler Bonds. Given that people now seem to be more skint than ever, you’d think there’d be an opportunity for cheap, basic motors once again – but where are they? Nowhere, because there’s not enough money to be made on them and nobody pays cash for new cars nowadays, so headline prices don’t have to be temptingly low.
Which is all a bit sad because Shed might be persuaded to wander into a new car showroom if it contained something small, cheery and cheap to run, i.e. the absolute opposite of Mrs Shed. In fairness, some manufacturers have tried to do cars like that in relatively recent history. Volkswagen’s 2011 Up! was an excellent little machine that stood the test of time right up until it didn’t in 2023.
Renault’s appealingly monocellular Twingo was surely the one though, predating the Up! by 18 years. The first Twingo cost less than £8k in 1993, but you’ll struggle to find one of those for sale in the UK now. Shed certainly couldn’t in the 15 seconds of research time he allocated to it. So if you fancy a Twingo but think that it became progressively less attractive with each new generation, your next port of call might well be a gen-two car like this week’s shed, billed as a 1.2 TCe Gordini.
The gen-two Twingo was based on the Mk 2 Clio so it’s a sprightly enough steer, aided in 1.2 Gordini guise by light turbocharging that took the engine up to 100hp at 5,500rpm. This version cost £11.5k new, which was more than £3k cheaper than the more overtly sporty 1.6 Twingo Renaultsport 133. Though it was 33hp down on the 1.6, the 1.2 also had less than a tonne to cart around, so it felt nippy enough with a 0-60 time in the nines and a top speed of 117mph.
You won’t get more than a couple of sarnies in a gen-two Twingo's 165-litre boot but you do get individual rear seats (leather here) and the VED rate is decent at £200 a year. The insurance will be cheap too, and 50mpg is easily on the cards. Altogether it looks like a fair shout for these troubled times.
The MOT ticket doesn’t have long to run and some corrosion was spotted at the rear of the car during last April’s test, so the number of live examples of this already uncommon car might be smaller still in a couple of months. If it’s any consolation, the only other Twingo to feature in SOTW, a 133 back in September 2019, is still running around and passing tests, but that was an early Cup spec car that’s clearly been deemed worthy of preservation.
Would such good intentions apply to this 100 though? Hmm, debatable. Rust wasn’t its only issue last year. Steering-wise the tester also noted some slight up and down play with the column, which for Shed sounds more like a fun activity with the postmistress than an MOT advisory, but let’s not get into that as Mrs Shed would have said if her husband had dared to suggest they get a Twingo.
Renault missed a trick with the Twingo in the UK, they screwed up not launching the original over here, Ford came in with the Ka, then Peugeot/Citroen/Toyota with their equivalent, the market was buoyant, by the time the MK2 Twingo was released here, it was too late.
Typically they were arrogant with what they thought the consumer wanted; higher spec cars, they didn't, when they realised, a low spec entry level was launched, however it had they old 8v 1.2 engine which was crap, not £20 or £30 to tax and quite thirsty, unlike the 107/C1/Aygo, hence the Twingo never really took off here.
Re car prices my parents were recently telling me they d seen a new Fiat (Grand) Panda and that its was good value at around £19k. Doesn't seem that longer ago that new Pandas were £5995.
Re car prices my parents were recently telling me they d seen a new Fiat (Grand) Panda and that its was good value at around £19k. Doesn t seem that longer ago that new Pandas were £5995.
This turbocharged Gordini is quite unusual, as they usually have the same 1.6 engine as the Renaultsport and not a TCe engine. That means you can spend a couple of hundred quid on a cheeky remap and you’ll be up to the same 133 bhp as the NA 1.6 Renaultsport with more torque to boot (131 ft-lb vs 118 from the 1.6). Should make for a car with around 136 bhp a tonne and a fairly lively, fun thing to drive.
We got The Boy a particularly clean RS133 as his first car and whilst he loved it after a pair of Nike Air and a bus, for those of us with experience it was frustratingly underpowered throughout the majority of the rev range. I spent a lot of time driving it to or from places whilst he was learning. It could have been so, so much better but just... wasn't...
We replaced it with a Mk8 Fiesta ST. Now that genuinely is a brilliant car.
Unfortunately they never made a RHD version for the UK market so that was the end of that. In the end she opted for a Renault 5 instead.
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