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France marque

Renault in the UK

Renault has sold cars in Britain since the early 1900s and its Clio has been a fixture of the small car market since 1991. It committed to electric earlier than most volume marques, and the Zoe it built from 2013 to 2024 is now one of the cheapest used electric cars on the market. Renault also owns Dacia, which sells the budget versions of much of the same engineering.

6Model lines
4Still sold new
5Body styles
5Fuel types

Reliability

How reliable is a Renault?

Nothing published at marque level

There is no reliability figure for Renault as a marque that this site could cite. What circulates instead is survey data from panels that select themselves, warranty claim rates published by companies with a product to sell, and averages built by choosing which years and variants to count.

Each of those choices moves the answer by several percentage points, and none of them is a measurement a reader could go and check. A number printed beside the Renault badge here would be our arithmetic wearing somebody else's name.

What is genuinely knowable is one car at a time: its own invoices, its own service record and what the common repairs on that model actually cost when they arrive.

Repairs

What a Renault costs to put right

No fault ordering is published for this marque

Nobody publishes a ranked list of what goes wrong on a Renault that this site could cite, so there is not one here. What is published is the price of the work, and the repair cost guides carry a range for every common job with the source behind it.

Model by model

Every Renault line we hold a record for

Renault models with the years sold in the UK, body styles, fuel types and how many fuels each line was offered with
ModelYears sold in the UKBody stylesFuel typesFuel options
Cliosince 1991Hatchback, EstatePetrol, Diesel, Petrol hybrid3
Captursince 2013SUVPetrol, Diesel, Plug-in hybrid, Petrol hybrid4
Meganesince 1996Hatchback, Estate, CoupéPetrol, Diesel, Electric3
Kadjar2015 to 2022SUVPetrol, Diesel2
Scenic1996 to 2016, then again since 2024MPV, SUVPetrol, Diesel, Electric3
Zoe2013 to 2024HatchbackElectric1

Before you buy one

What the Renault record does and does not settle

There are 6 Renault model lines here and the oldest of them went on sale in Britain in 1991. Of those, 4 are still sold new and 2 have finished. A finished line is not automatically a worse buy, but it fixes the newest example you will ever find and it decides how long the parts supply has had to run.

Between them those models have been sold here with 5 different fuel types: petrol, diesel, petrol hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric. That spread is the practical reason one figure for the whole marque would be no use to anybody standing on a forecourt. Electric cars lost their road tax exemption on 1 April 2025, so an electric one now pays the same standard rate as a petrol one of the same age. The alternative fuel discount that used to shave a little off hybrids ended on the same date, so hybrid badging no longer changes the bill. Diesels carry a particulate filter, and a car used only for short cold journeys will keep blocking it until the driving pattern changes.

Those lines were bodied 5 ways: hatchback, estate, SUV, coupé and MPV. The MPVs carry a second and sometimes third row of belts, and every belt, buckle and mounting is a wear item. The four wheel drive versions carry more driveline than the two wheel drive ones, and driveshaft boots and propshaft joints are all inspected.

Because the oldest line here reaches back to 1991, examples across this marque fall under all three road tax regimes: engine size for anything first registered before 1 March 2001, CO2 bands from then until 31 March 2017, and the flat standard rate for anything registered on or after 1 April 2017. That is why the tax figure on each model page names the year and the engine it applies to, and why it is safer to read the V5C than to take a rate from a badge.

What goes wrong on a Renault is decided by the individual car and the person who owned it last, not by the marque. Two examples of the same model and year, one serviced on time and one not, are in completely different condition, which is the honest reason a marque average would mislead you even if somebody published one. The invoices for the car in front of you name what was actually replaced, when, and at what mileage. Read those instead.