Renault has taken one of its most famous rally cars and rebuilt it as an electric drift machine. At Goodwood, Autotrader's Rory climbed into the 5 Turbo 3E, a squat two-door that looks like a hot hatch and behaves like something angrier. The video reports two rear-mounted hub motors producing a combined 555 horsepower and 4,800 Nm of torque, with 0 to 62 mph quoted at under 3.5 seconds. Power comes from a 70 kWh battery that Renault rates at around 400 km, roughly 250 miles, though the presenter notes that translates to about 20 minutes of hard driving on track. Rory did not get to drive it. He rode alongside a Renault test driver instead, and came away impressed.
The 3E is a nod to history. Renault built the original 5 Turbo in 1980 to go rallying, ripping the rear seats out of its humble economy hatch and dropping a mid-mounted turbocharged engine behind the driver, and the video notes it had to build roughly 400 road cars to qualify for competition. The new car keeps the wide, blistered look and adds a modern electric drivetrain. One detail the video does not dwell on is worth flagging for anyone treating this as an engineering statement rather than a collectible: hub motors, which sit inside the wheels, are unusual on a road car. Most performance EVs mount their motors inboard because motors in the wheels add unsprung weight, which can work against ride and handling. Renault is betting the drift-focused brief and the novelty outweigh that tradeoff, and with a strictly limited run, most buyers will treat this as a garage piece first and a track tool second. The presenter also points out the aero work the video walks through: large front intakes that feed air through the bonnet and out over the top to help with downforce, plus rear vents that both cool the wheels and double as the charging port.
From the passenger seat, Rory's read is that the 3E feels quick, light, and unusually responsive for an electric car, without the inert, heavy sensation he associates with EVs pushed hard. The video reports a 45/55 weight distribution, slightly lighter at the front, which the test driver says helps the rear step out in a controlled way. There is a drift mode with three levels and an electrohydraulic handbrake that first uses motor regen to slow the rear wheels, then bites with physical braking when pulled harder. On the numbers Renault gave the presenter, the car uses an 800-volt architecture that supports 350 kW charging and a 15 to 80 percent top-up in about 15 minutes. Renault will build 1,980 examples, the video says, a figure that points back to the 1980 original, with 100 of them earmarked for the UK. Inside, Rory describes a stripped, rally-flavored cabin: a roll cage behind his head, carbon-fibre bucket seats with a racing harness, red accents on the centre console, and a large hydraulic handbrake he is clearly itching to see used. He calls it the best Renault he has ever sat in.
Bottom line: This is a halo car, not a sensible one. The short run and roughly 20 minutes of track time per charge tell you who it is for: collectors and people who want a Renault badge on something genuinely wild, not buyers chasing value. If the driving experience holds up from behind the wheel the way it reads from the passenger seat, Renault will have built the rare electric performance car people actually lust after. The real question is price and whether all 1,980 cars find homes before the novelty cools.
Commentary on a third-party video. Figures and claims are as presented in the source and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.