The Renault Kadjar is on its last legs and its successor is already eager to show its face in the spring of 2022. The successor of the Kadjar will be given a completely new name and it will be the SUV that will soon be called Renault Austral that can be seen from all sides in these spy photos.
Renault does not seem to be completely satisfied with the Kadjar. Renault’s broader equivalent of alliance brother Nissan Qashqai will be followed in the spring of 2022 by a completely new generation to which Renault sticks a different name. The replacement for the Kadjar will be called Austral, Renault announced this week. The test work of the Renault Austral is already in full swing. In November, AutoWeek reader Lou Kamm already ran into a packed test sample in our own country and now the car has also been caught in a camouflage suit in Spain.
Design and technology
Where the Kadjar clearly stems from another Renault design period, Renault pours over the Austral with the much fresher design sauce that it introduced on the Mégane E-Tech Electric. The SUV will have flat LED headlights and less convex, round shapes across the board like the Kadjar that is currently on display. Just like the Kadjar is a technical brother of the previous generation Nissan Qashqai, the Austral will be that of the third generation Qashqai that appeared on the road a while ago. Just like that SUV, the Renault Austral will therefore be placed on the CMF-C platform, a base that opens the gates to electrification for the Kadjar.
The Renault Kadjar is only available with conventional petrol and diesel engines, but successor Austral will also have mild-hybrid and probably plug-in hybrid technology on board. It could well be that the Renault Austral will have a similar E-Tech plug-in system as the smaller Captur has, in which a 1.6 petrol engine is combined with an electric motor. Whether the Renault Austral also benefits from Nissan’s E-Power powertrain? That’s not entirely clear yet. It is quite possible that this technique is a so-called unique selling point from Nissan and so the Qashqai remains. There will be no electric Austral, but Renault is working on an electric SUV in this segment. The Renault Austral is 4.51 meters long, which means that it grows in length by about 2 centimeters compared to the Kadjar. It makes it about 8 centimeters longer than the current Qashqai. The still available Kadjar is also longer than the previous generation Qashqai with which it shares its base.
The Netherlands
Since the Dutch market introduction of the Kadjar in 2015, Renault has managed to sell more than 13,000 units in our country. The SUV experienced its peak year in 2016, when just under 4,000 copies of the SUV found a Dutch owner. Last year sales of the Renault Kadjar fell for the fourth year in a row and the Dutch sales counter ended at 667 copies. In the first eleven months of this year, 353 Kadjars were registered.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl