Renault Alliance - Reception

Reception

The Renault 9 had been voted the 1982 European Car of the Year, becoming France's most popular car and Renault's best selling model ever.

The Alliance was listed as number one on Car and Driver's list of Ten Best cars for 1983, with the magazine saying it "represents a blending of compact dimensions, surprising creature comfort, excellent fuel economy, good looks and very pleasing over-the-road behavior."

The American-built, French-designed, Renault Alliance had a U.S. content of 72% (The engine, gearbox, and some axle parts come from France) thus qualifying it as a domestic vehicle, and making it the first car (1983) with a foreign nameplate to win the Motor Trend Car of the Year award. Motor Trend subsequently dropped the distinction between domestic and imported vehicles for the award.

A 1983 Popular Mechanics survey of 1,000 owners said "60% of our respondents rated the Alliance's workmanship excellent. That's a high figure for any car and considerably above the norm for U.S. built cars." The magazine's editor-in-chief, John Linkletter, addressed the findings that, "the old canard about shoddy American craftsmanship suffers" and that "an American manufacturer and a foreign manufacturer can, in a combined effort, produce a very good car."

In 1983, Popular Science said, "Renault will find its reputation dramatically brightened when word of the AMC Alliance gets around," adding: "The new Alliance is a miracle for AMC. Not only does it show a general excellence in construction and appointments, it's also a state of the art front-wheel-drive that AMC could not have produced on its own. Combine those three elements and you have tough competition for the Escort, Chevette and Horizon and the imports, and a product that comes close to being the best in its class."

A 1983 report in the New York Times described, "the Alliance's appeal has brought AMC's United States car sales 117.6 percent ahead of 1982 levels."

After a long-term road test conducted by Popular Mechanics of a four-door with a 1.7 L and automatic transmission setup in 1985, and summarized the experience as a "faithful servant", but a "generic no-frills car" - except for the unusual steering wheel stalks - that "nothing gave us pause" with their "compliant appliance".

By 1986, a Popular Science comparison with newly introduced Asian-built competing cars, the Renault Alliance was described as the oldest design, and "felt the most refined." The road test noted the Renault did well in the tests with "trunk and doors closed with an almost Mercedes-like clunk" and "the car's excellent handling" allowing to remain poised trough potholes and "stable when passed by large tractor-trailer trucks." The Alliance performed better than the new Hyundai Excel and that Renault "dealers would be willing to negotiate on the final price."

In 1987, Popular Mechanics reported on the Alliance convertible in sports trim, saying "the GTA package is really excellent, transforming the bland Alliance econobox into a veritable Pocket Rocket."

In 1987, the New York Times reported, "despite the favorable early response to products like the Alliance and the Encore, the models failed to generate enough sales to prevent AMC's share of the car market from declining to about 1 percent."