After the current generation of Twingo it seems to be done with the mischievous little Renault. That reports the French l’Automobile Magazine based on statements made by none other than Renault CEO Luca de Meo.
Renault recently presented its plans for the future, giving an indication of what the brand will bring to the market between now and 2025. In between are fresh C-segmenters and a reborn Renault 5, of which the Renault 5 Prototype already served as a fun and apparently accurate forerunner. The Twingo will not get a successor, De Meo tells the French medium.
That means that after about thirty years it is the end of the story for the Twingo, of which the first generation debuted at the 1992 Paris Motor Show. It is especially the primal Twingo, whose name is a composition of the words Twist, Swing and Tango, that has managed to acquire a true cult status over the years. The current third generation Twingo was marketed in 2014 as the technical brother of the Smart ForFour. The new generation of Smartjes will soon be developed by Daimler and Geely together, Renault will no longer interfere with this. According to De Meo, it would not be profitable to develop a new Twingo yourself. The production version of the aforementioned Renault 5 Prototype is more or less given the task of filling the gap left by the Twingo, although the ‘new 5’ format technically becomes a car that is one step above the Twingo in the pecking order.
Since the Dutch market introduction of the first generation Twingo in 1993, more than 166,000 units have been sold in the Netherlands. Calculated from 1983, it has turned out to be the most popular Renault in the Netherlands after the Clio (about 250,000 units) and the Mégane (about 210,000 units). The second Twingo had its Dutch top year in 2011 with almost 21,500 units sold, partly thanks to a diesel that was friendly at the time. Last year only 1,849 Twingos were sold in the Netherlands, which means that the declining sales trend in our country continued. The current Twingo will in any case remain available for the time being, including the electric version.