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”, born too late to harbor any nostalgia for those stupid cars, born just in time to lust at current year Alpine a110s, Renault Clio Cups, and the first gen Citroen C4 Cactus.

So, let’s disregard a that Renault Oroch from from an earlier review. 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.

Expecting something else?

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.

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”.

For every Focus RS, there are twelve other Focus SE’s sitting somewhere with a blown dual clutch. And that’s the logic we start with.

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 Renault currently styling is perfectly fine, it sips fuel, it has Apple CarPlay and fancy graphics, it’s has drive modes and a vague amount of “user personalization” (it’s mainly just colored lights). 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.

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. You know turbo lag? Although the turbo does nothing more than sneeze a bit, you notice it takes its time. Is that a nitpick for what this car is? Sure but I promise you it doesn’t “add character”. Also sounds like a muffled generic Gran Turismo 5 “i4_sound.wav” soundbite being played through the speakers on a subway. Surprised much? And all 130 turbo 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, and the gas pedal operates on guesswork. Rental cars a truly magical.

What else, dynamics? It’s a 2023, it’s not dangerous or all that bad, it’s 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 felling the tightness.

All this to say, the poor Frenchie had it’s 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 off fuss. It’s small-ness paired to its slab-sidedness does still let it get jostled around like a Cessna in a hurricane. It will corner, not that the Captur wants to. Steering is numb, changes in quickness depending on driving mode. There really isn’t much to say that isn’t already obvious… it’s sloppy, it’s rolly, but it isn’t dangerous.

Alright, the interior. It’s very much standard modern car in here. Mercifully, the AC controls are physical knobs. Blows cold, even has rear vents for the passengers to ruin. However, if you look closely, you’ll notice three things:

1. Where are the radio controls?

2. Fucking Haptic Touch bullshit

3. The iPad mini screen of an infotainment system stuck there blocks one of the AC vents.

So, on the first, while you can use the screen, there are physical radio controls. No, not on the steering wheel either. 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, but in practice, I’m just fondling the radio chode until it did something. Also, in a normal seating position, it’s blocked from your vision. Good, I don’t want to look at it.

Moving back to the infotainment cluster, above a sea of mostly blanked out switches sits a touch screen. On the bottom, Haptic Touch “buttons” with no feeling give you quick actions 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 tachometer! And I think the vacuum sounds are louder. Or I’ve 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.

And that’s really about it. By 2023, 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? For most people it probably fits the bill perfectly. It’s just a nothing car with a somewhat interesting facade. It’s not even a car for “someone who’s resigned from the indignity of living” or some BS. It’s 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 and a stick.