By Antti Kautonen
Picture this: it’s 1984. You have a Christmastime journey through foggy France to complete, and you’re in luck: the Renault 11 TXE Electronic sitting on the parking lot is awash with every technological gadget you can possibly wish for – in 1984. Voice commands, digital instruments, anti-collision radar, an early navigation system, it’s all there in your European Encore.
And in this promotional video, the driver aids are not only demonstrated by the attractive driver, but also faithfully reproduced in 30-year-old 3d animation.
The 11 TXE Electronic was a special edition Renault 11, equipped with the same level of gadgetry as the bigger 21 and 25 models, featuring a digital dashboard and a voice synthesizer. You even see the person reading out the French-language commands, as development progress is documented. The all-white car here is clearly a promotional showroom piece, furnished with the sort of stuff that was still under development, but in “Pret pour l’avenir” (Ready For the Future), as the video is called, Renault wanted to show what they could do if asked of them.
Embedding is sadly disabled, so you’ll have to continue to YouTube. Click here.
The almost 20-minute, VHS-quality video is best viewed if you 1) like quirky old Renaults 2) like listening to French, with no subtitles and 3) like period correct background music. But no-one really did technological flight of fancy stuff quite like the French did in the 1980s, and the video shows you just how well they did it all.
[Source: Youtube]
Jeff Glucker