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Renault Makes Tiny Twingo GT That's More Fun Than the Real Thing

Renault probably knows about that kid who makes hundreds of times more views with his Power Wheels videos than Motor Trend. So they made one after the brand new Twingo GT. The bad news is that it's more fun than any city car.
Renault Makes Tiny Twingo GT That's More Fun Than the Real Thing 5 photos
Photo: YouTube screenshot
Renault Makes Tiny Twingo GT That's More Fun Than the Real ThingRenault Makes Tiny Twingo GT That's More Fun Than the Real ThingRenault Makes Tiny Twingo GT That's More Fun Than the Real ThingRenault Makes Tiny Twingo GT That's More Fun Than the Real Thing
After watching all three of the promo videos, I definitely know that we are being short-changed by the production car. I mean, the previous Twingo was a lot of fun, but this one is tall and narrow, not the mid-engined V6 monster of a concept we saw many years ago.

Many of the YouTube comments say the same thing: screw the big car, give me the one the little girl was using. It seems so much more agile and pulls U-turns a real Twingo probably couldn't perform without tipping over.

But worst of all, the kid-sized Twingo is so agile that they had to speed up the footage for the real one. You thought we wouldn't notice, Renault, but we did.

Under the hood of the Twingo, you will find... nothing but the windshield washer fluid. Instead, the engine is under the trunk, a little 0.9-liter turbo. To make the GT, they've had to increase the turbo pressure, install sports exhaust, an air scoop, and a new water pump.

It's an engine shared with the Brabus smart forfour, by the way, and is supposed to get you from 0 to 100 km/h in 9.6 seconds. While that's not stellar, the upshot is that it's frugal. But the smart is auto-only, while this is manual-only. We'll leave it up to you to decide which makes more sense.

The older Twingo GT had a 1.2-liter turbo engine, and I bet engineers wanted to do the same here. But because there's not enough room under the floor or they just couldn't get another powertrain financed, that didn't happen.

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About the author: Mihnea Radu
Mihnea Radu profile photo

Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida.
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