We’ve got to hand it to Renault:  those crazy French owners of Nissan (okay okay… “strategic partnership”) have some of the most eclectic new designs and concepts in the industry.  Always pushing the bill, they often bring out great creations (like the Megane concept).

And so, at the Paris show this year, they are set to debut the Ondelios concept.  The vehicle, while not extremely attractive, is also not extremely unattractive.  Therein lies the Design merit: the vehicle as a concept contains several interesting features and resolutions, while wrapped in an awkward egg-shaped body.

Quick hit review after the break. (In other words, read on for more pretty pictures.)

The exterior of the vehicle contains several nice details and elements: the execution of the tail lamps, the nicely (and refreshingly unique) proportioned body and stance, and a nice new take on the Renault front grill — complete with integration of head lamps into one big maw, and a couple of wispy “eyebrows” pulling back from it.

The vehicle has some very nice linework, (what we Designers call effective “East-to-West” line sketching).  The big concern is that these lines tend to have unnatural intersections, often creating strange graphic behavior.  The door is also way too large.  Gull-wing always “seems” like a good idea, but in this case it would have been better to utlize the tried-and-true suicide doors.

The interior has that Star Trek aesthetic that is becoming all-too-prominent in concept cars these days.  Pushing the envelope is almost always a great thing to do on a concept, but when there are so many details loaded into it, each one tends to get drowned out by the collective sum.  Great lighting ideas and nice surface transitions are lost in the plethora of forms and technology going every which way.

Overall it is a nice design concept, with some nice details… but details that get lost in some mistakes here and there.