Start with what the Renault 4CV is: a 4-door saloon / 4-door cabriolet / 4-door panel van with 747 cc Renault Billancourt engine, built from 1947 to 1961, in a decade split by war, when civilian production stopped and restarted. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Fernand Picard.
The background
The Renault 4CV (French: quatre chevaux, pronounced [kat.ʃəvo] as if spelled quat'chevaux) is a car produced by the French company Renault from August 1947 through July 1961. It is a four-door economy car with its engine mounted in the rear and driving the rear wheels. It was the first French car to sell over a million units, and was superseded by the Dauphine.
The 4CV was of monocoque construction, 3.6 m (11 ft 10 in) in length with front suicide doors. CV is the abbreviation of chevaux-vapeur, the French equivalent to "horsepower" as a unit of power. The name 4CV thus refers to the car's tax horsepower.
The engineering
The engine is 747 cc Renault Billancourt engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. On the scales it comes to 620 kg. Drive goes through a 3-speed manual. The layout matters: the engine hangs behind the rear axle, a layout that gives ferocious traction out of a corner and a reputation to match on the way in. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Where it sits
In the Renault line-up the Renault 4CV has a clear place: it replaced the Renault Juvaquatre; it handed the line to the Renault Dauphine / Renault 4; the factory was Boulogne-Billancourt. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Citroën 2CV, the Porsche 356, the Chevrolet Bel Air. Its Renault stablemates include the Renault 10 and the Renault 10CV.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Renault 4CV — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.