Renault ZOE: a car conceived and designed to be 100% electric from the start, a pretty face and a built-in multimedia tablet that geeks will love, plus she’s good for the planet… Renault ZOE is THE car that we’ve all been waiting for since the revelation of the ZOE Preview show car, which already boasted 90% of the mass-production model lines. Renault ZOE not only looks good on paper, after our test drive we’re totally under its electric spell!
ZOE a pleasure to drive, because it is so quiet and punchy, it is also a genuine concentrate of innovations. More than 60 patents were filed in ZOE’s design phase. The most significant is the Range OptimiZEr, which enables ZOE to offer the longest range of any volume-production electric vehicle (210 km in the NEDC cycle and 150 km in standardized urban and peri-urban driving). ZOE is also fitted with a regenerative braking system that recovers almost all of the energy that is lost when the brakes are applied. When the system is working, the little battery on the dashboard lights up brightly to show that the battery is being recharged. And the system also comes into play when the accelerator is released. The motor recovers the vehicle’s kinetic energy and converts it into electric current that recharges the battery. In our test drive, we drove 40 km on enough power to cover a range of 32 km in ECO mode.
ZOE is also fitted with Michelin Energy E-V tires with low rolling resistance and a heat pump that consumes between two and three times less than a conventional system, which means that you can use the air conditioning and heating as often as you like.