Not much more uneconomical than its successor
No matter how much Renault tried, the first generation Twingo was so successful that no successor ever came close to ‘the original’. It is therefore not surprising that the new Twingo presented last month strongly resembles the original model. If Renault builds such a bridge to the past, we can do it too. How economical was the Twingo when it still used petrol?
The ugly first Twingo has never known anything other than 1.2-liter four-cylinder petrol engines. That does not mean that the Twingo always had the same engine. In the first years, until mid-1996, it was a 1,239 cc eight-valve with 55 hp. From June 1996, the engine shrank to 1,149 cc, but it did produce a nice 60 hp. In the year 2000, the eight-valve was joined by a 16V, which produced a maximum of 75 hp. With a curb weight of 820 kilograms, that made the Twingo smooth enough.
Consumption Renault Twingo 1.2 8V
We start with the Twingos from 1998, equipped with the new engine with two valves per cylinder. We have a neat number of 29 consumption values, which allows us to provide a good picture of consumption.
The average consumption that drivers of such an eight-valve Twingo achieve is 1 in 16.3 (6.1 l/100 km). The most economical driver sets a value that makes us frown, namely 1 in 23.8 (4.2 l/100 km). It is unclear what this driver had to do to achieve this, but the gap with the second most economical Twingo is very large. The driver of that copy ‘does’ 1 in 19 (5.3 l/100 km), but just like the first driver, the measurement was stopped quite quickly.
We prefer to see longer distances, such as the 15,372 kilometers that the next rider covered. The average consumption? 1 in 18.6 (5.4 l/100 km). Economical driving is also possible if you do not hypermile for a short time. An even longer distance? This driver achieves the factory target of 1 in 17.2 (5.8 l/100 km) for more than 56,000 kilometers.
The least economical Twingo drivers score in the region of 1 in 13 to 1 in 14. A driver who has been driving a 1998 copy for more than thirteen years achieves an average of 1 in 13.7 (7.3 l/100 km ). Looking at the interval between refuelings, we suspect that this car mainly makes very short journeys. If you do not find this value impressive, a comparison with the ‘primeval engine’ may help. The seven drivers with this tortoise achieved a joint average of 1 in 13.4 (7.4 l/100 km).
And the sixteen-valve?
The sixteen-valve engine, delivered later, seems to be chosen less often. Also, only seven users entered their fuel receipts. So it does not provide as complete a picture as with the eight-valve, but now that we are there… The consumption average that users achieve with this engine is 1 in 16.6 (6 l/100 km). The most economical? 1 in 18.8 (5.3 l/100 km). The least favorable value is 1 in 15.6 (6.4 l/100 km).
We previously looked at the consumption of the current generation Twingo in this section. Drivers with a three-cylinder Twingo SCe 70 achieve an average of 1 in 17.5 (5.7 l/100 km). This makes the new one more economical, but not extremely more economical than its predecessor. In that respect, we are sure that the new Twingo will do better.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl