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Renault Koleos



The first car to be designed as a joint effort by Renault and Nissan engineers is part MPV, part SUV

James Scoltock reports

Who supplies the Koleos? Click here...

After nearly a decade of existence, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has produced its first full joint development: the Koleos SUV. Set up in 1999, the alliance brought Renault and Nissan together in a cross-shareholding agreement.

The original idea was that the companies would work together only in areas where both would benefit – mainly in purchasing, but also sharing development of base technologies.

This has slowly been changing. Although Nissan has based vehicles on Renault designs in the past – the 2001 Nissan Primera was based on the Renault Laguna and Nissan’s Micra, Note and Versa shared a lot with the Renault Clio – the Koleos is the first car designed and built by the alliance.

Renault designed it in France, developed it in Japan with the help of Nissan engineers, and will manufacture the vehicle in South Korea at Renault-Samsung. But Nissan will not sell the vehicle. Renault will sell it in more than 40 markets, including European countries and South Korea.

The OEM hopes the car’s sedan styling and MPV-like interior space will allow it to win sales in the emerging crossover market.

Bringing the vehicle to the market was a big decision for the two companies, as each is a separate entity, with its own corporate culture and brand identity. But it was Nissan’s experience in the 4x4 market that made the project possible.

“Nissan has produced this type of car for more than 50 years,” says Koleos project manager François Laurent. “Renault has relatively little experience, and no credibility in the technology. If we went alone then it might not be very good for the customer.”

The Koleos was four years in the making. The main issue was in the different companies’ working culture, says Laurent: “Each company has its own standard for development, for engineering, and each company has its own expectations.”

Renault uses the same platform used by Nissan for three different cars – the Qashqai in Europe, the Dualis in Japan and the Rogue in the US. But Renault wanted its vehicle to have a softer exterior than its rivals and to be sure it met its high standards for safety.

Styling for the Koleos was done at Renault’s Guyancourt Technocentre in France, but the engineering was done at a satellite site in Japan with Nissan engineers on secondment. “We had to involve Nissan engineering because we had many issues: links to the platform, the front axle, the rear wheel arch, the engine compartment,” says Laurent. “But it was a Renault programme and, for the Nissan engineers, the daily meetings to progress the project was a new approach.”

The car is supposed to be part MPV, part SUV but, while the driver and front passenger are given plenty of space, the rear seats lack the room of a fully fledged family car. The split tailgate does lend itself to an SUV and will earn kudos from the target market.

“We designed the car with practicality in mind,” says Laurent. With ground clearance of 206mm (188mm for the diesel) and approach and departure angles of 27° and 31° respectively, the off-road capability starts to become apparent.

Renault has also integrated a Hill Descent Control system which holds the vehicle’s speed at 7km/h on steep downhill gradients.

In normal conditions, the Koleos is a front-wheel drive vehicle. But, should the car start to lose grip, up to 50 per cent of the torque can divert to the rear axle. The split is controlled by the All Mode 4x4i system Nissan introduced on the X-Trail compact SUV last year.

It’s no Hummer, but on potholed, stony tracks the Koleos feels safe and capable. But, by making the car more capable off-road, fuel economy suffers by around 10 per cent.

The top-of-the-range dCi 175, a 2-litre 127kW (175hp), 360Nm diesel, has fuel economy of 7.9 litres/100km with CO2 emissions of 209g/km. The 110kW entry-level two-wheel drive dCi 150 consumes 7.2 litres/100km and producing 191g/km of CO2.

The Koleos will be built at Renault-Samsung’s Busan plant, where capacity is 240,000 units per year, which should be comfortable enough. Last year the plant built 179,272 units, including 5,000 Koleos.

“We used the plant because the South Korean SUV market is around 30 per cent of the car’s total sales, but Samsung doesn’t have a vehicle in this segment. So 20 or 30 per cent of the Koleos production will be for the South Korean market only. The remaining 70-80 per cent will be exported to overseas markets,” says Laurent.

France , Italy and Spain will be the first European markets to get the car in June. The Koleos will be priced between €24,900 and €34,600.

As Renault and Nissan start to work more closely together, particularly in emerging markets such as India, future joint engineering projects will have to be quicker, but the experience gained on the Koleos will be invaluable. If the OEMs can devise better ways of combining their working cultures and brand characteristics, the alliance shows signs of having a serious opportunity to move upmarket.

Who supplies the Renault Koleos?