Renault 18

This is the catalogue record of the Renault 18, one of 498 models Renault has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1978. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Renault 18 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Mazda Mazda RX-7, the Toyota Toyota Supra, the GM (General Motors) Saab 900 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Renault 18 reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / Petrol: / 1397 cc Renault Cléon-Fonte engine#CxJ / C1J Straight-four engine / I4 / 1565 cc Renault Cléon-Fonte engine#C2L / C2L I4 (Argentina) / 1565  kerb weight is recorded at 940 kg (base); drive goes through 4 / 5-speed Manual transmission / manual / 3-speed Automatic transmission / automatic; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Renault story

Within Renault's own catalogue the Renault 18 sits alongside the Renault 10, the Renault 10CV, the Renault 11CV, the Renault 12. The record names the Renault 12 as its predecessor and the Renault 21 / Eagle Medallion (North America) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to class = Mid-size car / Large family car (D). Assembly is recorded at France: Boulogne-Billancourt / Argentina: Santa Isabel, Córdoba / Santa Isabel (Renault Argentina) / Australia: Heidelberg, Victoria / Heidelberg (Renault Australia) / Chile: Los A.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Renault 18 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.