The price of this popular Renault has seen an incredible variation between 2019 and 2023.
The years pass and the observation remains: purchasing a new car represents a significant expense, often several tens of thousands of euros. The inflation which has affected France since the first months of 2022 has obviously not helped anything. But can it alone explain the variation in prices of certain car models observed in recent times? Certainly not according to the non-governmental organization Transport
The work carried out by the NGO reveals to what extent city dwellers are hardest hit by price increases. This is a shame for models intended for the most modest households. At the top of the ranking of cars whose price has increased the most in four years, we find the best-selling mini city car in France: the Twingo. Appearing like a UFO in the French automobile fleet in 1993, the most popular Renault celebrated its 30th birthday this year.
In 2019, according to Transport
The diamond brand’s star city car – there will be almost 1.2 million of them on our roads in 2023 – is not the only car in the small car segment to have seen its price soar. The NGO cites other mainstream models such as the Peugeot 208 or the Seat Ibiza but also more high-end models such as the Mercedes A class or the BMW 1 Series. If manufacturers mainly highlight the increase in prices of energy and raw materials to justify the increase in their prices, there are other explanations.
The first being that car manufacturers, particularly European ones, have chosen to drastically reduce their production of city cars in recent years. By producing on a smaller scale, manufacturing costs naturally increase. The other explanation is to be found in the electrification of vehicles. Forced to produce more and more vehicles equipped with one or more batteries, brands have seen their expenses skyrocket. To cushion them, they have chosen to significantly increase the prices of their small models which ultimately have no more popularity than the name.
Faced with the difficulty of making city cars profitable, today supplanted by SUVs, manufacturers are adapting. Thus, Renault has already announced that it will cease production of its Twingo in 2024 – including the recent E-Tech electric version – despite still very decent sales scores. The failure to replace small cars is also a bad signal for motorists who could find it increasingly difficult to find new vehicles at affordable prices. Unless we turn to Chinese brands, and even then, given the financial constraints that the French government will impose on them, from next January, through its ecological bonus/penalty system.
