Renault Zoom

The Renault Zoom was an electric concept car created jointly by Renault and Matra and first introduced at the 1992 Paris Motor Show. It was a small two-seat urban car about 2,650 mm long and 1,520 mm wide, driven by a 45 kW electric motor. Its distinctive feature was a variable wheelbase: the rear wheels folded up, shortening the car to about 2,300 mm for parking while the width stayed constant, and two scissor doors on inclined axes kept the space needed to open them to a minimum. The Zoom came out of shared research by the two companies into modern electric city cars, and its electric power system was described as 90 percent recyclable. It never entered production, partly because it was only a concept and partly because the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles did not yet exist, but the folding-wheelbase idea was revisited later by the MIT CityCar and the Hiriko folding two-seat electric car.