As an American car enthusiast, French cars hold a special place in my heart. Born too young to be able to laugh at the “le car” or harbor any nostalgia. born just in time to lust at current year Alpine a110s, Renault Clio Cups, and the first gen Citroen C4 Cactus. Forbidden fruit kept from me an ocean away.

So, let’s disregard a that Renault Oroch from an earlier review for a moment. That’s just a rebadged for South America Dacia Duster anyways. And dive head first into the full fat French car experience baby!

Aaand it sucks. But it sucks aside from its French-ness. Mostly.

Was I Really Expecting Something Else?

A little bit. We lust for what we can’t have right? When the speed limit says 45, you want it to be 50. When your mom said no to that toy when you were six, suddenly that was the most important thing. When the IRS comes for you, you armor a bulldozer. And when Renault (as well as the others) pull out of the US market and tease us with mid engined v6 hatchbacks and bizzaro luxury cars, we sit back and salivate at the forbidden fruit.

However this lousy excuse of a “car” takes that mystique of “ooooh French” and shatters it like a stale baguette against a wall. It pissed all over my lust for the Alpine a110 with no remorse. It takes the ingredients of a manual, turbo-four French hatch and adds a layer of boredom, tall suspension, and disappointment to what most of us in the U.S. under 30 think of for “quirky French cars”.

Thank you modern crossovers, you’ve managed to make French cars boring.

From the Outside In

It’s a crossover. It looks like to yearns to be an innocent hatchback that some poor designer had to jack up and clad up before sending it off to war like an automotive homunculus. It’s slow, it’s kinda dreary, it’s full of “hip and contemporary technology”, and it drives like a fucking waterbed. Hello modern Renault! Go die (like the Megane).

Yea it took this long to get to the meat of the car due to its genuine un-remarkablility. It’s a modern tiny crossover. The at the time current Renault styling is perfectly fine, it sips fuel, it has Apple CarPlay and fancy graphics, and a vague amount of “user personalization” (aka choosing different ambient lights and drive modes). Other reviews don’t lie, if you need a small car with the fuel economy of a dieting hamster, and live in a place with “sub-par” road surfaces, it’s acceptable thing. But this is MSIMA, and you’re not here for genuine consumer advise about French crossovers are ya. You glutton for automotive punishment.

Exuberant Power

The Captur’s engine requires you to mash the throttle like its a dick in a cock-and-ball torture video and you’ve been payed extra to go hard. It doesn’t want to rev to its 6000-something rpm limit. You can heal-toe but you’ll need to sit and wait for that turbo to remember what it’s purpose is before the 1.3L i4 does anything of worth. Speaking of, behold, an engine:

I love how the intake air completely wraps around the motor. You can trace it from the air box, down the back beneath the block, into the turbo at the front-bottom of the block, up the intercooler, over the top of the motor and into the intake manifold at the back of the engine. They’ve forced the air to do a full loop around before it gets to be used for something useful. I wonder if there is any noticeable turbo lag given that fact that the car’s turbo does nothing more than sneeze a bit (you do). Is that a nitpick for what this car is? Sure but I promise you it doesn’t “add character”. The Captur also sounds like a muffled generic Gran Turismo 5 “i4_sound.wav” soundbite being played through the speakers on a subway. Surprised much?

All that turbo laggy 130 hp is paired to a 6 speed that’s not the worst, especially for the egg of mediocrity it finds itself in. The clutch, however, is like stepping on a soggy potato. Meanwhile, the gas pedal operates on guesswork. Rental cars a truly magical.

Driving The Egg

What else, dynamics? It’s a 2023, it’s not dangerous or all that bad, just sloppy. I had this thing as a rental in Ibiza, which is mainly comprised of small, twisty little mountain passes, like one highway, and a two small cities. Oh and an obsession with two lane roundabouts. Driving there is actual chaos, and those roundabouts also don’t help. The backroads either have a van going too fast, or a hatchback going too slow, and are filled with speed bumps. And the cities? This is Spain, anything larger than this Captur and you’ll be feeling the tightness.

All this to say, the poor Frenchie had its worked cut out between the road surfaces and elevation changes. It’s pretty gutless on the highway, but feels stable. The slight ride height increase lets it go over bumps and shit road surfaces without too much of a fuss. The car’s small size and flat sides will joyfully enable you to get jostled around like a Cessna in a hurricane if you’re lucky enough of encounter a crosswind.

It will corner, not that the Captur wants to. Steering is numb and nothing the car has will change that. Driving modes affect weight and supposedly quickness as well, but like… it’s a Renault Captur… what is your expectation really? What’s more can I add that isn’t already obvious? It’s sloppy, it’s rolly, but it isn’t dangerous.

Meandering Around Inside

Alright, getting in here you’re very much greeted by “standard modern car interior”. Mercifully, the AC controls are physical knobs. The AC blows cold, strong, and even has rear vents for the passengers to ruin. What isn’t as nice or thought out is the fact that iPad mini screen of an infotainment system haphazardly stuck to the dash blocks one of the AC vents. Nice.

If you continue to look closer at the interior, you may notice the following:

1. Where are the radio controls?

2. Fucking Haptic Touch bullshit

3. Seriously fire whoever placed a vent behind the glued in ipad of many things

On that first observation, while you can use the screen, there are physical radio controls hidden in here. Nope, not on the center console or arm rest. Nor on the steering wheel. Behold consumers, the nub:

While a radio stalk isn’t anything new, there’s a good reason that they’ve become an endangered species… they’re fucking asinine. Sure, if I lived with it I would probably memorize all the little movements without even looking. But in practice I’m just left to fondle the radio chode until it did something. It’s also blocked from view in my normal seating position. Good, I don’t want to look at it anyways.

Let’s move back to that infotainment cluster. Above a sea of mostly blanked out switches sits a touch screen and a row of capacitive touch “buttons”. The strip of numb grants you quick access to the menu, nav, and settings. You’ll also you lose faith in the engineer who invented those buttons, but I’m saving that for a VW review.

Like any good modern car, you’ll skip almost everything in the screen and go straight for Apply CarPlay. And like most modern cars, the Captur has driving modes! Why? Beats me, but I take it some poor soul that longed to work at Renault sport or Alpine got stuck in software development. What’s different? Well, in sport, you get quicker steering and a digital tachometer finally appears! Oh and maybe the vacuum sounds are louder. Or maybe I’ve just gone numb driving. The other modes aren’t worth taking about, except the “personalized mode”, which lets you select sport vs regular vs eco for everything but the engine it seems. You can choose your interior lighting color for any mode, so sleep well at night. Oh, and if you want to change driving modes, you need to use the screen and navigate menus. Because of course you do.

Fin

And that’s really about it. By 2023, most automakers have figured out how to make a car. And let’s be honest, there are very few genuinely bad cars made in the past, say 6 years? A sea of mediocre vehicles that sometimes have annoying features, sure, but truly bad? Or dangerous?

For most people the Captur probably fits the bill perfectly. It’s a nothing car with a somewhat interesting facade. It’s not even a car for “someone who’s resigned from the indignity of living” that just wants to get somewhere while a bit of brain matter exits their nostril. It’s more of a car you buy once you can afford to not take the bus to buy groceries, with the added benefit that you can blast your music without needed headphones. Not much more to say really, it’s just “eh”. This ain’t a sports car that made “the sin of being dull”, it’s a 1.3L crossover that just happens to be French.