Renault 4 until 1994 and Citroën Méhari and Renault Rodeo

Well, I’ll tell ya what— my Daddy apparently owned not one, but two Renault 4s before I was even born and before he met Mama back in the late '70s. Now, one of ‘em was supposedly the American version with all them fancy chrome and nickel-plated bumpers. Real sharp lookin', I reckon.

My uncle? He had himself the very first model from 1961, so he was ahead of the game.

"Y’know, you can fix these up into somethin’ downright cool," Daddy’d say. "Throw on a buncha chrome, slap a surfboard on the roof, and don’t forget a smokin’ hot gal to take along to the beach!"



Well, lemme tell ya, Daddy's gotta funny story 'bout how my uncle, way back in the late '60s, asked him to drive his Renault back to Stavanger from Fornebu, while ol' uncle himself hopped on a plane straight to London. Now, reckon Daddy wasn’t too thrilled 'bout it, since he didn’t really have the time to spare, so I’d betcha he was plenty ticked off back then.

I also recall one time back in the '90s when Daddy and some of his work buddies took me, my brother, and a few other kids on a canoe trip down at Fjorda by Bjoneroa, over yonder in Randsfjorden, in what used to be Oppland County. Out there, we came across this real beat-up ol’ Renault 4, which one of Daddy’s colleagues was still drivin’.

The whole group dang near laughed themselves to death over that rusty ol’ clunker. Even Daddy said he hadn’t been behind the wheel of somethin' like that since the '70s. Now, that colleague was a proper hippie, just like you'd expect from a fella in his situation. But, ya know, a few years later I heard somethin' mighty sad—our poor hippie got rear-ended bad, and unlike Daddy’s run-in with that Mazda I wrote 'bout before, well... let’s just say it didn’t turn out too well for the hippie.

Well now, lemme tell ya— the Renault Rodeo and Citroën Mehari are kinda in the same league, maybe even cooler, and definitely more suited as beach rides. But they’re somethin’ extra special too, since there were only a little over 200,000 of ‘em ever made, compared to the Renault 4, which had over 8 million roll off the line.

The Renault Rodeo might just be the rarest of the bunch, with only about 60,000 units built.

As for the Renault 4, well, production kept on goin’ all the way till 1994 in Slovenia, even though most places stopped makin’ 'em by '92.


Renault Rodeo on vacation


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