Renault Avantime
The Renault Avantime was a prime example of a manufacturer letting a designer express his creativity to the full. Sometimes it works, at other times, such as in this case, it proves an expensive mistake.
The Avantime was styled by Patrick Le Quement and was meant to be an estate-sized car with the attractions of a coupe. It was full of odd details, like the pillarless doors – the design manager was quoted as saying the aim was to continually astonish viewers as they walked around the car. They were, but probably not in the way Renault intended.
Those doors – they were huge, really heavy to open because they measured some 3.5 feet long, accessing both the front and a back that was far more cramped than it should have been in a car this size. One needed the equivalent of two parking spaces to leave enough room to get out of the Avantime…
Sales hopes were not helped by Renault launching another large car at the same time, the Vel Satis. This was pretty quirky but much better than the Avantime – for a start it had four doors. Avantime sales lasted just two years, the Vel Satis not much longer, though it survived in left-hand-drive form until 2009.
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