New Renault Filante SUV launches fresh attack on the premium car market
To be sold in Korea and other overseas markets, the posh coupé-SUV – with a built-in Mario Kart-style game – will influence our cars too
This is Renault’s new luxury flagship car, the Filante. Stop laughing, everyone who remembers French flops such as the Vel Satis and Avantime: this coupé-SUV isn’t destined to die on the rocks of Europe’s premium car market, but instead have a crack at the Hyundai group’s stranglehold in Korea.
The Renault Filante offers lashings of space, comfort and technology. At 4.9 metres long it’s a big car, with an almost identical road footprint to Audi’s discontinued Q8 e-tron. Renault boasts it has best-in-class rear kneeroom, along with a comfortable suspension and civilised acoustics to deliver two Korean customer non-negotiables.
Power comes from a hybrid engine, which has similarities with the Clio hybrid’s twin-motor approach. But the petrol engine itself differs: the Filante runs a 1.5-litre turbocharged four-cylinder pushing out 150bhp, compared with the Clio’s naturally aspirated 1.8. And while the European supermini only musters 158bhp in total, add in the coupé-SUV’s electric power and total output is 247bhp.
Could this engine find its way into European Renaults such as the Austral SUV? Auto Express asked Renault’s head of product, Bruno Vanel, who told us: “It’s much bigger, so it would completely destroy the engine compartment! And the 1.2-litre turbo hybrid with 200hp and 104g/km of CO2 is [already] localised in Europe.”
Vanel didn’t rule out the powertrain – developed in Renault’s HORSE partnership with Chinese car giant Geely – coming in future, but emphasised pure electric was a more likely drivetrain solution. And the Korean gearbox – an electrified continuously variable transmission – doesn’t dovetail with European tastes.
But the Filante will influence our Renaults. “It will feed Europe in terms of components and our competitiveness,” said Renault brand chief Fabrice Cambolive. Renault is going on an international offensive, investing €3 billion (£2.6bn) in eight models for Korea, Latin America, North Africa and India to roll out by 2027, with the goal of doubling international revenue.
Renault’s bespoke Korean models – it also sells the Grand Koleos, a smaller, boxier SUV – have electronic architectures that are test-beds for over-the-air (OTA) software updates, to iron out glitches and bring new features to cars. Vanel reckoned Renault was heading towards one million OTA updates with the Grand Koleos, with multiple upgrades across the 50,000 models in Korean hands. “[In Europe], we are benchmarking how we’ve managed to be so efficient in Korea with OTA updates,” he told us.
“Technological trends are coming more and more from Asia,” the product boss added. The Filante spreads out three 12.3-inch touchscreens across the entire dash, with the passenger alone getting one to stream movies and surf the web. Or they can even zoom through sticky traffic ahead, playing a ‘Mario Kart’-style game which overlays your play on live pictures from the forward-facing camera. But future European dashboards will have more subtle displays, likely with a band of digital readouts at the windscreen’s base, as on BMW’s new iX3.
The Filante was designed by Renault’s Korean studio feeding into the Paris HQ’s design team. “It’s a car designed for Korea,” said Renault Group design supremo Laurens van den Acker. “We’re using some cues from Europe, such as highlighting tech elements such as the front- and tail-lamps, as the new Clio does. We’re creating strong light signatures and illuminated logos.”
Under the bold bodywork, the Filante has a second link with Geely: it shares the CMA chassis beneath the Volvo XC40, various Lynk&Co cars – and the Grand Koleos. While that car is effectively a reskinned Geely Monjaro, “the Filante is 200 per cent a Renault, we have changed everything” Vanel told us, citing its longer front and rear overhangs and lower roof height.
Renault, which has long had a presence in Korea, originally building cars with Samsung, is one of the country’s top international brands, although sales of around 50,000 in 2025 lagged behind BMW and Mercedes. That said, everyone is a minnow compared with Hyundai, Kia and Genesis, which together take 80 per cent of the 1.2-million car market. Orders for the Filante begin in March.
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