Test driving a vehicle gives you a very good indication of how a vehicle drives. Spending a week with a vehicle gives you a true indication of how the vehicle will serve you as a daily. To put evidence to the statement, we spent the week driving in the top-of-the-range Radiant Red Renault Kiger 1.0 Turbo Itens CVT.
From a performance perspective, the vehicle pushes out 74kW of power and 160Nm of torque. But what does this mean in terms of daily driving? As a daily driver in and around the city, the vehicle certainly has the necessary power to pull up steep hills and get off to relatively quick starts without too much hassle.
To delve into the driving dynamics a little more, the vehicle comes fitted with a selection of three driving modes: normal, sport, and eco. A choice of driving modes in a vehicle in this segment makes it even more attractive if it is not attractive enough already.
The ideal city slugger?
The sport mode taps into the vehicle's full potential, giving a decent burst in acceleration. It's super responsive and helps provide that great zippy feeling. It also comes in particularly handy at a four-way intersection affected by loadshedding. Shifting into sport mode helps push through quickly to keep traffic flowing. However, this will likely incur heavier fuel consumption. We also noticed the vehicle tended to be a bit noisy in this mode, which is fully expected given the engine is being put to maximum use.
From a performance perspective, the vehicle pushes out 74kW of power and 160Nm of torque. But what does this mean in terms of daily driving? As a daily driver in and around the city, the vehicle certainly has the necessary power to pull up steep hills and get off to relatively quick starts without too much hassle.
To delve into the driving dynamics a little more, the vehicle comes fitted with a selection of three driving modes: normal, sport, and eco. A choice of driving modes in a vehicle in this segment makes it even more attractive if it is not attractive enough already.
The ideal city slugger?
The sport mode taps into the vehicle's full potential, giving a decent burst in acceleration. It's super responsive and helps provide that great zippy feeling. It also comes in particularly handy at a four-way intersection affected by loadshedding. Shifting into sport mode helps push through quickly to keep traffic flowing. However, this will likely incur heavier fuel consumption. We also noticed the vehicle tended to be a bit noisy in this mode, which is fully expected given the engine is being put to maximum use.
With fuel prices spiraling out of control over the past 12 months, it's great to have a drive mode that slashes the fuel consumption. On the flip side, we found the Eco mode to be extremely sluggish at take-off and for general driving. Gaining momentum proved somewhat tricky, and we would not recommend this unless you're doing longer-distance driving.
The normal mode proved to be the most balanced and gave a fair accord to the vehicle's drive quality. Responsive enough on the throttle without comprising the overall consumption rate. Across all driving modes, we found the cabin noise insulation was satisfactory. We do believe there is slight room for improvement in this area.
We racked up roughly 300km with predominantly stop/start city driving. Considering the times of exorbitant fuel prices, we made it our mission to potentially maximize fuel efficiency to see the best consumers can get from this vehicle. Most time was spent alternating between the Normal & Eco modes. Overall, we averaged roughly 7.3-litres per 100km. A full tank of fuel would have landed us approximately 550km. At the time of writing, this means a full tank of petrol (40-litres) would set you back roughly R935.
It has and does what you need it to do
From a practical viewpoint, there's lots to love about the Kiger with a couple of caveats. Approaching the vehicle, you will notice the super stylish lighting setup. This provides Tri-octa Pure Vision LED headlights and LED daytime running lights that also proved sufficient even during our 100km night roundtrip.
The vehicle comes fitted with a Digital 7-inch Multi-Skins Driver Mode TFT Cluster and a Digital Instrument cluster. The displays are both extremely useful as well as aesthetically pleasing. The dashboard and surrounds have a plastic-like look and feel, but we were not too perturbed by this.
The interior is extremely spacious, yet the vehicle is relatively compact overall. Regarding boot space, it's impressive that Renault has managed to fit in a sunk-in boot along with a full-size spare tire. We certainly believe the increased ground clearance of the vehicle has a major helping hand with the addition of this little bit extra space.
Furthermore, the center console has sufficient room for storage, which houses a deep bin. However, one area that surprisingly seemed to lack space was the leg room around the accelerator pedal. This proved to be a slight hindrance for us. The lack of dedicated cupholders was a minor but disappointing omission. Potentially one slightly disturbing omission is the lack of a cover behind the brake pedal. While this does not impact performance or pose any inherent risk, this was not particularly pleasing on the eye.
After a week with the vehicle, we needed to take our analysis a step further a get an idea of the cost of ownership. We ran the math behind a hypothetical cost of ownership of the top-spec Renault Kiger 1.0-litre Turbo Intens CVT and came up with the following:
Whilst the vehicle has many stand-out features and a couple of forgivable snags, we believe that the Renault Kiger provides extremely great overall value to consumers searching for a compact SUV around the R300k price bracket. It is exceptionally well priced and offers great bang for your buck!
It comes as no surprise that of the Top 50 Sold Vehicles in South Africa in August 2022, the Renault Kiger (999 units) has outsold almost all other vehicles in its segment, including the Chery Tiggo 4 Pro (779), Hyundai Venue (712), Ford EcoSport (477) & Nissan Magnite (412) with the only exception being the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
You can jump into a brand new entry-level Renault Kiger from as little as R2 828 per month from Motus Renault. Also, a massive thanks to Irene Jordaan of Torque The Talk and Viviene Ward of Renault South Africa or affording us the opportunity to drive the vehicles.
Alternatively, you can shop a range of pre-owned Renault Kiger’s on Gumtree.
Now that you’ve got the knowledge, it’s time to shop! Head to gumtree.co.za or your Gumtree app (click for Apple & Android) and don’t forget to use your location settings to find local service information close to home.
