Somaca issued the following announcement on Feb. 22.

For several years, design has become the first criterion for the purchase of a Renault. But how did the brand get there? Via which strategy? How did the teams organize to work? It all starts in 2009.

Laurens van den Acker takes over the reins of Renault design in 2009, while the brand is looking for a stronger identity. It immediately lays the foundations of a more emotional design that identifies a Renault model at a glance. With its teams, it launches a concept car program representative of the diversity of the Renault range. To highlight the human dimension of the brand and its values of proximity, each of the six concepts developed between 2010 and 2013 is declined, through the petals of a daisy, around the symbolism of the life cycle. While announcing the new stylistic language of future Renault - sensual, Latin expression and colorful - even prefiguring some models ahead,

DeZir, released in 2010, is the first concept car that illustrates this new cycle of life. A favorite vehicle that inspires the fourth generation of Clio, it embodies the Love petal and offers voluptuous shapes enhanced by its passion red hue. Inside, we sit on a cloud where 6 million red LEDs light up and beat like a heart. DeZir is followed, among others, by Captur, R-Space or even Initiale Paris, each embodying in its own way another facet of this famous cycle of life.

Since 2016 and the concept car TreZor, Renault's design teams have begun a second cycle around this daisy. This is an exploratory cycle where, in particular, SYMBIOZ illustrates Renault's vision of future mobility. From an object that we take and leave as we go, the car becomes integrated, connected to our lives. It is an integral part of our ecosystem, and is able to collect and share data with our family, or the objects around us.

This new strategy has been accompanied by a change of organization From an organization by range, the direction of design has been structured around trades: interior design, exterior design, colors and materials, UX / UI design, etc. It has also benefited from the transformation of its creation center at the Guyancourt Technocentre, with a central objective: decompartmentalize the teams. Thanks to a favorable environment for communication and more transparency, new synergies are emerging.

In support of Guyancourt, the Design Department has a network of six international design centers: Renault Design Asia (South Korea); Renault Design India (Mumbai & Channai); Renault Design Central Europe (Romania) and Renault Design America Latina (Sao Paulo). This system aims to develop projects that are as close as possible to the expectations and specificities of the various Renault Group markets. Regardless of these locations, each of which benefits from the most advanced means of design and digital visualization, Renault's Design relies on a multicultural team of 545 people, integrating some thirty different nationalities.

The launch of New Clio illustrates the success of this new design strategy implemented since 2009. The brand's iconic vehicle, the goal of this fifth generation is to perpetuate its potential by capitalizing on its strengths. But with more details, and a better control of the volumes that make the vehicle go upmarket. New Clio knows an inner revolution and an external evolution without forgetting to take again the best of what offered his elders.

Original source: https://group.renault.com/actualites/blog-renault/design-renault-du-cycle-de-la-vie-au-multiculturalisme/