History

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Automotive Industries page on X November 2024, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Renault 21 is a large family car produced by French automaker Renault between 1986 and 1994. It was also sold in North America initially through American Motors dealers as the Renault Medallion and later through Jeep-Eagle dealers as the Eagle Medallion. A total of 2,096,000 units were produced.

The Renault 21 saloon was launched in the beginning of 1986, as the successor to the successful Renault 18, and this was followed a few months later by the seven seater station wagon, the R21 Nevada, marketed as the Savanna in the United Kingdom. In 1987, What Car? awarded the Renault 21 GTS Best Family Saloon. The Renault 21 Savanna was awarded Car of the Year, as well as Best Family Estate.

Unusually, the Renault 21 was offered with disparate engine configurations. The 1.7 litre version featured a transverse engine and transmission, but Renault had no gearbox suitable for a more powerful transverse engine: accordingly, faster versions featured longitudinally mounted engines. The two versions featured (barely perceptibly) different wheel bases: the engines were all relatively compact four-cylinder units and the engine bay was large enough to accept either configuration without reducing passenger space.

However, at a time when production technologies were relatively inflexible, the need to assemble differently configured engine bays on a single production line, along with the supplementary inventory requirements imposed both on Renault and on the dealership network, did compromise the Renault 21's profitability.

The Nevada/Savanna station wagon/estate version was slightly longer than the saloon, and was available configured with seven seats, two of those a forward-facing foldable bench seat for children (up to about age 10) that used up much of the luggage space when up. It had roof rack side rails as standard.

First unveiled on 20 November 1985 and officially launched in February 1986, the R21 gave Renault a new competitor in this sector after eight years of the R18, which was declining in popularity after a very strong start to its commercial life. It had a razor like design, which was different from contemporary cars of the era, e.g. the Ford Sierra (with its "jelly mould" design) and the Opel Ascona.

It was sold in right hand drive for the United Kingdom from June 1986.

The car was revamped considerably in May 1989, both technically and aesthetically – the new sleeker outward appearance was similar to the also recently revamped Renault 25, and a liftback body style was also added to the range (which soon became more popular than the saloon in France) along with a sporty 2.0 L Turbo version. Of the saloons, the TXi 2.0 12v and 2.0 turbo were also available with the four-wheel-drive Quadra transmission. The Nevada wagons received four-wheel-drive in the eight-valve 2.0 and in the naturally aspirated 2.1 Diesel, as the 12-valve and the turbo were not available with this body style. The front-wheel-drive 21 Turbo was capable of 227 km/h (141 mph). At the 1989 Frankfurt Motor Show the fuel injected 2.2i model was introduced, originally reserved for the German market (being a different model than the earlier 2.2s built for the US) where insurance and tax regulations suited larger engines with less peak power. Injected engines were equipped by Renix engine control unit, developed by a joint venture by Renault and Bendix. This car was also available with four-wheel-drive, exclusively as a Nevada.

The Renault 21 liftback and saloon petrol models ceased production in the beginning of 1994, following the launch of the all new Laguna liftback, but the diesels and the Nevada/Savanna remained on the market, until their replacement Laguna variants were launched (end of 1994 for the diesels, and end of 1995 for the Nevada/Savanna).

A Renault 21 TSE, donated as a personal gift to Václav Havel by the president of Portugal Mário Soares just before the Velvet Revolution, served for a while as the official state car of the President of Czechoslovakia in 1989.

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