Techno Esprit Alpine

A hot technical mess - could be much better

My car is a lease vehicle and when it arrived (September 2024) the online version of the Symbioz support app was not available, I eventually managed to download a PDF version of the drivers manual about a month later. Great, but it demonstrated that Renault UK hadn't got their act together before deliveries started. The Captur controls are quite similar though.

Driving - This is an interesting car to drive. Do I call this a mild hybrid? I don't know. I don't know how many gears it has either, the marketing material says six speed - four gears with two additional motors. That must be marketing speak for something. The car will run in electric-only mode for short distances but you don't really have any control of when that happens. Dynamically it's difficult to judge what the car will do next. I can drive at 30mph to the end of my road and the engine will rev like I'm driving in first gear. At any time whilst driving the engine can rev loudly without adding any speed. And on the cold mornings the power delivery is often inconsistent, you can feel the handover between the drivetrain components with a sudden boost or dip in forward motion, regardless of what the right foot is doing. Other mild hybrids don't have this problem.

The economy doesn't feel that great. I think it has a smaller tank than my previous vehicle so I seem to fill up more often than I'm used to, I rarely see 50mpg. With this level of complexity Renault should do better than my old diesel.

The brakes are another story, they are not confidence-inspiring. As with many hybrid or electric cars, reviewers often mention the transition between regenerative and physical braking. In the Symbioz you definitely feel that and it means you end up braking earlier than you might usually do to work round it. More serious is when the brakes seem to pull to one side, a bit like torque-steer which you don't want when braking - certainly not in the wet.

Interior and controls - Without the manual getting to know what the controls did was difficult - If you have an Android tablet that might help. First, turn off all notifications unless you want to keep getting WhatsApp/Email/Message notifications whilst driving. Simple things like changing dashboard illumination levels are buried in the settings and it's not very effective anyway. The whole Renault and Google thing seems premature, overly confusing and there have been a couple of bugs. One example is the drive mode selector. You can select it from the central screen or from a button on the steering wheel. Drive mode selection from steering wheel is slow and requires you to to take too much attention from the road. Once, when changing mode, the dashboard completely reset, everything blacked out whilst driving at night on the M25. Scary as that was, thankfully the driving wasn't affected.

On the audio side, shortcuts and volume/audio controls are hidden. When not in Carplay or Android Auto mode the level of customisation around the standard map is limited to one or two fairly useless options.

It's so new I haven't been to the dealership or had any other costs other than fuel but I still have strong feelings about the Symbioz. I think it is a good looking car but all in all I'm not a fan. This is actually the fifth Renault I've had, I hope the teething problems have been resolved by the time you read this but meanwhile when a family member asked if they should get one, my answer was a simple no.

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