Renault Just Proved That Making a Good, Affordable EV Was Never That Complicated

Making a good electric car people actually want, and keeping it within reach of an ordinary household budget, has never been complicated in theory, yet few European manufacturers have actually managed to pull off both at once. Plenty spent the past few years pricing their EVs like premium products while building cars that looked and felt like compromises. Renault took the more obvious route with the R5, styling it like something people would actually want to be seen driving rather than just tolerate, and pricing it firmly among the best electric cars under €25,000.

Renault’s Douai plant is now hiring more than 350 people to keep up, a real sign of how much the site’s production rhythm has picked up this year, according to automobile-magazine.fr. Also, the roles are tied directly to production. No prior industry experience is required, which could mean Renault is keeping costs down with a cheaper, less skilled workforce, or it could simply reflect how scarce qualified industrial labour has become after years of declining interest in factory jobs across the sector.

Douai builds six models across four brands, the R5 E-Tech, Scénic E-Tech and Mégane E-Tech for Renault, the A290 for Alpine, and under the wider Renault Nissan Mitsubishi Alliance, the Nissan Micra and the Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross. The demand behind that hiring push shows up plainly in the sales charts too. Renault placed four models in France’s top 10 electric sellers for August, more than any other brand.

EVs made up 38% of French registrations in August and 30% for 2026 overall. France’s leasing social scheme, which reopened in mid July offering 50,000 cars at up to €200 a month, and a revalued CEE incentive (Certificats d’Économies d’Énergie, France’s energy savings certificate scheme), worth up to €5,700, both helped push that share up.

I already covered Renault Group’s announcement that it had built one million electric vehicles in France since 2010, and even then the company had hired 550 temporary workers since the previous October and introduced a part time night shift, with a further production increase expected for September. That piece anticipated exactly this moment.

Things didn’t always look this promising, though. A 2019 parliamentary question raised in the French National Assembly noted that the site, originally built to accommodate 12,000 workers, had shrunk to around 3,000 employees, with interim staff numbers falling from 2,000 to roughly 250. The site employed 2,815 people at the end of 2025, and adding hundreds more in a single campaign marks a real reversal for a plant that spent years losing staff.

It’s fair to say there has been a decent government nudge in that direction. Renault, like most EV manufacturers, still leans on subsidies and social schemes to keep prices low enough for buyers to actually say yes, and that support remains part of the equation. Renault also isn’t announcing 350 direct hires of its own, since the campaign runs through interim contracts, so the numbers deserve some caution. But the core lesson still holds: Renault needed a car people actually wanted at a price they could actually pay, and the company is now hiring because that combination has proven it works.

Featured Image: Renault