In December last year, then Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo made it clear that he was happy to take questions on anything over dinner – so long as they didn’t concern the top job at Stellantis, vacated 24 hours earlier by Carlos Tavares.

I found a way to ask him anyway, and he certainly had prepared an answer. He took it well – much better than what I thought was a more innocuous question about whether retro design was a strategy Renault would be continuing with.

De Meo firmly rejected my suggestion that the new 4, 5 and Twingo were retro, insisting they were instead what those cars would have looked like had they stayed in continuous production. If they were retro, he said, then “the Golf is a retro design, the S-Class is a retro design… We’ve just taken some of the classic designs and spirit and moved them into the 21st century.”

I got his point, but I still think he’s wrong. The very definition of ‘retro’ is to be ‘imitative of the past’, and what are the 4, 5 and Twingo if not that? And what’s the problem if they are?

Indeed, François Leboine, the man who designed the 5 and has since moved to Fiat, where he has created the Grande Panda, doesn’t shy away from either of the pair being labelled retro. A spade is a spade, after all.

Troubled car makers have often looked to the past to revive or reinvent themselves – with mixed results. Not everything can be a BMW Mini or a Fiat 500 (another de Meo creation): just ask VW how the New Beetle did or try to keep a straight face as Ford claims the current Capri is just like how the old one would have ended up by now anyway. 

Audi’s future starts with bringing back the original TT, while BMW’s Neue Klasse EV range, although decidedly more modern in its styling, harks back to its 1960s glory days in the execution and ethos of the project. What’s old is new.

Citroën is another brand looking for a shot in the arm as it wrestles with its future identity, as recently outlined by new CEO Xavier Chardon. For the past year, a saga has been playing out starring one of its own icons, the 2CV.