Renault Kwid review, road test

Renault’s ambitions are clear. The company wants to be a big player in the Indian market, and to do that, you simply have to have an affordable small car that’ll sell in big volumes. It may have first tasted success with the Duster, but the made-for-India Kwid is Renault’s first strike at the volume business. This lower end of the market though is very difficult to master, and as a result, currently has only two contenders. The first needs no introduction – more than 3 lakh Indians buy a Maruti Alto each year, while the second car – the stylish Hyundai Eon, comes nowhere close on sales. Maruti has had a stranglehold on this segment for more than three decades now, and it’s a mammoth task to beat a company whose mainstay is affordable hatchbacks. Renault, a relative newbie in India, knows it won’t be easy to take on the brand equity and reach of Maruti, so instead, it has made sure the product itself is very strong. The Kwid debuts a new, modern Common Module Family platform (called CMF-A) and 98 per cent of the car is localised! That’s not all; it looks less like a hatchback and more like a crossover – a more appealing body style for Indian buyers, and it gets best-in-class equipment and space. On top of it all, Renault shook the industry by pricing the Kwid quite close to its arch rival. We already picked it as our favourite in our comparison test a while back, but now it’s time to get under the Kwid’s skin in a full Autocar road test.