Designed years before it reached Renault: British designer Fergus Pollock sketched the concept for Chrysler UK in the 1970s, Matra developed it for Chrysler’s French subsidiary Simca as a possible Talbot, and only after PSA judged the project too risky did Matra bring it to Renault as project J11.[1] The result kept Matra’s fibreglass-over- galvanised-steel-spaceframe construction and was built on Matra’s own line in Romorantin, not a Renault plant. That was a detail that shaped the car’s whole first decade, since Matra’s limited capacity kept deliveries constrained even after demand caught up with the concept.
The English Wikipedia article is unusually thin on hard figures for this generation: it gives engine displacements but no power, torque or weight for any of the launch engines. Where noted, this entry draws those figures from the French-language Wikipedia article’s infobox instead; the prose above is written independently, not translated from it. Even the French article gives no output figure for the 2.1 Turbo D, so that trim’s power field is left as an honest placeholder rather than a guess.