Long live the quadricycle: the Renault Twizy is back

Mobilize Duo and a cargo variant called the Bento are set to arrive next year

With the new Mobilize Duo around the corner, is there still a market for tiny EVs in the UK?

I’m pleased to see the Renault Twizy replacement will arrive in the UK, and I’m not a little surprised, given I didn’t think the previous one set the world alight when it was here the first time around.

But the Mobilize Duo and a cargo variant called the Bento are set to arrive next year, if a job advert for a product manager for the quadricycle is anything to go by. Please set pricing and keep an eye on Citroën Ami sales.

I’m pleased Renault’s quadricycle is making a comeback, though, because as far as fun goes – and that’s my primary decider on how much I like a car, given this is after all my hobby – the Twizy was right up there. It was terrific for whizzing around the town where I lived, with younger child in the back seat, squeaking between some bollards the back way into the supermarket car park to beat the queues.

It would even do 50mph or so, more on a downhill run with the wind at its back. That made it much more palatable than the Ami, which can do no more than 28mph and feels somehow more perilous, even though it’s an enclosed-cockpit vehicle.

The Twizy’s ride quality wasn’t too clever, because it was a relatively tall, light weight vehicle and I don’t suppose that was ever the developer’s priority, but it steered pretty well and handled like a kart.

As electric vehicle fun goes, I think my top handful includes a Hyundai Ioniq 5 N, the original Tesla Roadster, a Nissan Leaf with plastic back tyres and, in there somewhere, a Renault Twizy.

Not that fun was what it was designed for; it was just a by-product of light, funky design. Nor, obviously, was it meant to be subjected to an Autocar road test ’s performance testing equipment or go a distance. I had to load it onto a trailer to make it to our MIRA test facility, otherwise the journey would have taken me a day or two. And when I say that 17sec was a significant number during its acceleration tests, that’s because it took 17sec more to reach 50mph against the wind than it did with the wind behind it (for a 36sec average).

Still. I think I’d have liked one and would probably have used one quite a lot had it come with a range-extending little generator on the back to counter the 34-mile average range we recorded. The claimed range was 62 miles. This time around, the top speed is reckoned to be similar, but the range is 87 miles.

When the next generation of batteries reaches these vehicles (Nissan expects to introduce solid state batteries with double the energy density and three times the charge speed in 2028), I think it will be transformational for things like this. Anyway, I’m quite revved up for it. Which may be because it’s summer. For eight months of the year, put a coat and a grimace on. 

Incidentally, while mistyping Twingo for Twizy for the nth time this morning without even realising it, I think for the first time I’ve noticed the similarities between the two vehicles’ names.

I’m not sure if the similarity is deliberate; it would make sense if it was. But it seems Twizy is short for ‘twin-easy’ and Twingo is a portmanteau of ‘twist, swing and tango’.