Things start well inside. There are proper chunky door handles and a funkily-designed interior with body-coloured highlights and soft rubber mats, at least in the stowage bins, albeit not everywhere.

Some proper dials and buttons remain and, a bit like in the previous Fiat Panda, there are themes to lift the ambience without costing anything.

Renault designed a Twingo font, and the alphabet plus a couple of special characters are stamped into the headlining. This cool design cost nothing to implement, explains van den Acker, because you’ve got to stamp the roof lining anyway.

The designers wanted a ‘small outside, big inside’ feel, and plenty of glass area and no segmentation between occupants means that’s what they’ve got.

The instruments are bold and simple, while the vents, steering-wheel buttons and array of switches in the middle are all real.

If there is an issue, and it might not be one, the right side of the steering wheel is a bit cluttered, with the gear selector, wiper stalk and audio controls all competing for space behind the wheel, which also has paddles behind it.

Those change the amount of regenerative braking you get: left for more of it, as far as an aggressive lift-off single-pedal mode; right for less, as far coasting.

To counter the fact that short cars can’t have big rear accommodation and big boots, the Twingo has just two chairs in the rear, both of which slide independently of each other through about 17cm, so you can trade knee room for boot space. They fold separately too.

And, perhaps more innovatively, the boot floor is split 50:50, so you can lift half of it to reveal a 50-litre underfloor compartment to, say, remove the charging cables without having to lift all your bags out.

All things considered, boot capacity is put at 360-1010 litres.