Renault 4 E-Tech’s grille is a first for the brand

Today Renault has talked about the Renault 4 E-Tech‘s grille in painstaking detail. The company is obviously very proud of the grille, using words like “brilliance”.

The grille’s outline lights up, and the Renault logo lights up too, for the first time. That’s the gist of the ‘innovation’ here. Renault isn’t the first car maker to have such features, but the 4 is the first Renault to have them.

The company keeps referencing the original Renault 4 in order to stoke people’s nostalgia, saying its round headlights and the rectangular radiator grille made it have a very specific look, like a facial expression. And of course the company is trying to do something similar, though not 100% identical, for the 4 EV. The words “light is today’s new chrome” have unironically been uttered in the official press release.

The lit-up grille is a consequence of EU regulations on vehicle lighting being updated in June 2023 to allow such things, because what European roads definitely needed was moving billboards advertising various car brands’ logos with the power of LEDs. Thankfully, the regulations state the logo has to be a maximum size of 100 cm² / 15.5 in², which seems entirely arbitrary but we’re glad there is a limit, otherwise who knows where we’d be at.

There’s a sculpted pattern in the black interior of the grille, “forming a deliberate contrast with the clean lines of the lighting components”, Renault says, and “the logo appears to float, as if levitating”. The grille is “not only beautiful” but also “efficient and optimized for repairability”. The rear lights also “revisit the original R4, with the capsule in three parts”.