Renault Symbioz

Renault finds an opening for yet another family-friendly SUV, this one with compact proportions and hybrid power Renault boss Luca de Meo has a knack for populism when it comes to new models, and he’s clearly very happy for the formerly alternative and once-innovative volume car brand he now runs to simply keep on bringing the kind of cars that people are actually buying right now.By this tester’s reckoning, his firm will have eight models on sale in the UK by the end of this year, across the well-worn B-segment (supermini), C-segment (compact) and D-segment (mid-size) – and six of them could loosely be described as SUVs. The latest is the Renault Symbioz, a hybrid-powered, smaller sibling for the Austral, and between the two, Renault hopes to outnumber and outflank the likes of the Nissan Qashqai, Kia Sportage and Volkswagen Tiguan.