Wild Renault 5 Turbo 3E leads local French renaissance

One of the wildest vehicles ever to hit Australian roads will arrive soon, with confirmation several local customers have produced the $300,000 necessary to secure one of the 1980 Renault 5 Turbo 3Es that will be built.

Forget Ferraris, Lamborghinis and McLarens, the car most likely to have teenagers reaching for their smartphones in 2027 is a small Renault hatchback.

The French brand has confirmed it holds a number of orders for the wild 5 Turbo 3E, a carbon-bodied all-electric hatch that sends 400kW to its rear wheels in homage to the 5 Turbo Maxi Group B rally car of the 1980s.

Just 1980 will be built in total and the local price tag is expected to be in the region of $300,000, but while Renault Australia has said the numbers don’t stack up on the standard 5 electric hatchback for now, homologating the crazy Turbo 3E was worth the effort.

“That’s more of a brand exercise,” Renault Australia general manager Glen Sealey said.

“That’s a crazy car, as a brand image it’s fantastic, there’s nothing like it in the market.”

Renault’s Australian sales have dropped significantly in recent years to just 4569 in 2025, and that number is heavily reliant on its commercial vehicles – the Trafic and Master vans make up almost 60 per cent of the total.

While it doesn’t have grand volume plans, Sealey recently told carsales that 6000-6500 is a sustainable number: “Can you live in the Australian market with 6000 cars, 6500 cars? We can. And we’re ok with that.”

Plenty of action has taken place behind the scenes in order to give this sales lift a chance at reality.

An important component of this growth will be the introduction of the Symbioz compact SUV in mild-hybrid and hybrid guises, offering a more affordable entry point to the brand.

The Trafic van has been updated for 2026, the Duster and Scenic E-Tech are new additions and $10,000 was sliced off the price of the Megane E-Tech to make it more competitive, but Renault’s fortunes are likely to hinge on the arrival of new generations of its two top-selling models: the Master van and Koleos medium SUV.

“We had to get our SUV range sorted, which we’ve done,” Sealey said.

“From $30,000-$66,000 we’ve got a nice range there. We’ve got multiple drivetrains to suit various customer demands.

“We want to attract people who would like electrification but can’t, so people who can’t plug in… we’ve got a product for them in Duster, we’ve got Symbioz, we’ve got Arkana hybrid.

“We’re after an affluent audience with Arkana, we’re after a younger family with Symbioz, but also an older generation, because that will work, and also for Duster because it’s really simple.

“For those that can plug-in and would like to plug-in, I personally think with Scenic, we offer one of the few cars you can actually have as your single car.

“Heaps of room in it, it’s very functional, 625km of range, you can use that car for multiple purposes.”

As reported previously, what’s not coming are the small 5 and Twingo EVs that are proving very popular in Europe, simply due to the competitiveness of the Australian marketplace.

“A pure EV as a city commuter car is the perfect car,” Sealey said.

“We’ve got Megane [E-Tech], which is quite small from our perspective, not from a European perspective, but from our perspective … and that sort of serves that purpose for us.

“If we want to slot something in underneath, it’s a pretty competitive environment.

“For us to look into that space, it would have to work for the OEM, it would have to work for our dealer network and, most importantly, it would have to work for the customer. [If it] ticks those boxes, we’d do it.”

The Renault 5 Turbo 3E is expected to arrive in Australia early in 2027, with the new Koleos and Master scheduled by the end of that year.

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