Renault 8

The Renault 8 is one of 498 Renault models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1962. 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 8 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. 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 Alfa Romeo Alfa Romeo Giulia, the Ferrari Ferrari 250 GTO, the Volvo Cars Volvo P1800 — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Renault 8 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 956 cc Renault Cléon-Fonte engine#CxC / Cléon-Fonte Straight-four engine / I4 / 1108 cc Renault Cléon-Fonte engine#CxE / Cléon-Fonte I4 / 1255 cc Renault Cléon-Fonte; drive goes through 3-speed manual / 4-speed manual / 5-speed manual; the layout is Rear-engine, rear-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 8 sits alongside the Renault 10, the Renault 10CV, the Renault 11CV, the Renault 12. The record names the Renault Dauphine as its predecessor and the Renault 14 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Assembly is recorded at France: Flins Renault Factory / Flins / Algeria: Algiers (:de:Construction des Automobiles Renault en Algérie / CARAL) / Australia: Heidelberg, Victoria / Heidelberg / Bulgaria: Pl.

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

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Renault 8 costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.