Close.

Tanner was one of the starts of Top Gear USA, right? I guess he could have been a Stig in an earlier iteration of the show?

Tanner Foust? I swear his name has been mentioned before as a driver for either Top Gear or The Grand Tour.

And then there was the Stig from Top Gear America. I wanna say he was a race car driver from Nebraska, but his name escapes me at the moment.

I made this poster on the history of car keys back in college as part of a series on the fascinating and unknown history of everyday objects. And that’s when I too found out the Renault Fuego was the first car with remote keyless entry!

As per Wikipedia, apparently about $8500 at release, or about $23k today, which seems quite a bit more reasonable. No expert on the Australian market, but fairly sure interesting things skew a little expensive there. I'm Canadian, for reference,  and even though CAD and AUD are often close enough to par, it seems they…

Well done, I don't remember them being that crazy back then.  In the states I'm not sure what a comparative price in 83' would be.

Yup, AUD as per the rest of the fine print, although that's not much better. It apparently works out to about $55k today. That's roughly Golf R money, which it's hard to imagine the Fuego competing in that stratosphere. 

Back in the late 80's one of my brother’s friends had a Fuego...his family only bought European cars, so that’s the one he picked (my brother had an 81 Jetta 2-door, their other friend had a 77 Scirocco, and the fourth in the set had a...Chevy Citation coupe). He had an issue with it when visiting and we went to the…

The Renault Fuego and the Isuzu Impulse were 2 of my favorite cars when I was 13. 

Wasted technology on the Alliance. You could just leave it unlocked. I’m not sure who would want to steal one, and there was a high probability that at any given time it was broken down and wouldn’t move anyways.

This price cannot be correct, maybe Australia $?

Whenever I see an old add like this with an MSRP, I can’t help but run over to the CPI Inflation Calculator. That Fuego was forty three grand in today’s dollars.

Renault/AMC could have had way more fun with the Alliance. AMC owned the Rebel name, which at one time was a performance trim level on the Rambler.

I was around when the Fuego started selling, and someone at our country club had one. I thought, “that’s the coolest-looking piece of French crap ever.”

Bizarrely, I was convinced I’d learnt this from one of your articles. I guess I’d read it somewhere and automatically filed the memory under Torchinksy with the tail lamps and cars for squid.

We should rename the heckblende the Jaytor.

The plipper also let Renault have cheekily deceptive ads like that one there that suggested the car was fast, but actually meant, you know, fast at unlocking. Really, the Renault 18-based Fuego wasn’t all that fast.

“The Fuego was a great-looking car, I always thought, and even if it wasn’t terribly engaging to drive, this is an extremely significant first to have under its black plastic, ribbed belt.”

Yes, as it was infra red. So a beam of light basically.