The Renault Megane E-Tech is set to be updated next year, and the electric hatchback will be repositioned as a performance model as part of its update, Autocar has reported.
This new direction for the Megane E-Tech was brought about by the electric model’s sharp decline in sales in the past 18 months, according to Autocar. Renault CEO Fabrice Cambolive told the publication that the Megane E-Tech will be repositioned as a “hot hatch or a hot car,” adding that it is the direction the company wants to go in.
Renault is also exploring the viability of a new performance model, and the “first proposals” for this will be shown within 12 months, Cambolive said. While there has yet to be official confirmation, the revised Megane E-Tech and the new performance model are expected to be linked, according to the publication.
Cambolive revealed that the updated Megane E-Tech will receive a larger battery, which is likely to be the 91 kWh unit currently in the Nissan Ariya Nismo and the Renault Scenic E-Tech. In the Airya Nismo, the 91 kWh battery provides up to 418 km of range on the WLTP testing standard.
“We need to sell more of [the Megane]. If you put a new battery in the car, which is very expensive, and you don’t change the car, then it’s really hard to seduce people to pay more for it,” Renault Group design chief Laurens van den Acker told Autocar.
“So we needed to justify the change underneath the skin by showing something on the skin, and then we thought that what the world was missing was kind of a hot-looking EV. And so we thought we had nothing to lose, so we’ll just push that,” he continued.
The last dedicated high-performance version of the Megane was part of the fourth-generation facelift that was unveiled in 2020, which went out of production in 2023.
In Malaysia, the facelifted Megane RS arrived as the RS 300 Trophy in 2021, getting increased power and torque outputs but dispensed with the manual transmission, and was instead offered solely with the six-speed Efficient Dual Clutch (EDC) transmission.
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