Renault’s retro-influenced 4, 5 and Twingo have gone down a storm, but the French automaker has very different plans for its other models. The company’s design boss says an army of new EVs launching from 2028 will look forward, not back, and begin a design shift away from traditional SUV shapes.

Design boss Gilles Vidal suggests we look to this year’s Embleme concept, a sporty, low-slung crossover, for an idea of what to expect when the new-generation electric cars arrive on their also-new EV platform.

Related: Renault Embleme Concept Is A Sleek FCEV Crossover With Ultra-Low Emissions

“The cars before the Embleme were maybe a bit misleading, because you see a 5, a 4, a Twingo,” Vidal told Autocar.

“The Embleme is a better representation of what’s next for the brand globally in terms of design, and maybe new silhouettes, for the future: generous shapes, not too minimalistic, but simpler than what we did lately on Scenic.”

Vidal even suggested that wagons, whose market share has been eroded by SUVs and crossovers, could influence future sport-utilities. He described sport wagons as “kind of sexy” and said their low rooflines but large cargo areas made sense for EVs that need to balance the twin priorities of practicality and driving range.

Vidal acknowledged that anti-SUV sentiment, which is particularly strong in the automaker’s home city of Paris, was a consideration during the design process, but believes that maybe the hate was unwarranted.

“There’s still a huge fight against SUVs on principal, but would you say the same thing about MPVs?” he asked Autocar’s reporter. “They are the same weight, have the same engines, the same CO2 emissions. But no-one would ever criticize an MPV, a respectable family product. Who are we to criticize aggressive looking cars?”

But while Vidal’s team is striving to come up with something entirely new and forward-looking to replace Renault’s familiar SUV shapes, that doesn’t mean it is already making plans to cut short the lives of the 4, 5 and Twingo. He described the trio as “timeless” and claimed they’d evolve slowly, like Fiat’s retro 500.

It’s only been a few months since the Alpine A290 GT premiered as the performance-focused version of the new-age Renault 5 E-Tech, but the car manufacturer is open to building an even more insane model with the famed Renault 5 badge.

Long before the new 5 E-Tech premiered as a rival to the Mini Cooper EV, Renault provided the world with a tantalizing look of a future electric super hatch with the 5 Turbo 3E. The car, showcased purely as a concept, looked like a modern Group B rally weapon and insiders say there’s an internal push within Renault to make this vehicle a production reality.

Read: Renault R5 Turbo 3E Is A Modern EV Take On The Homologation Special

Auto Express claims the vehicle could be built around a bespoke spaceframe chassis and may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Renault design chief Laurens van den Acker acknowledged such a vehicle was “not high on our priority list right now,” but didn’t deny the project’s existence.

“Obviously, we fill our drawers with sketches of our dreams, and this would be one of them,” he said. “We always have ideas, every designer has his dream cars in his drawers.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the potential for the car to become a production reality. In late 2022, Renault chief executive Luca de Meo said the brand had found a way to bring something close to the concept to the road, but said it was all a matter of money. At the time, de Meo acknowledged that Renault didn’t have “deep, deep pockets.”

For the concept, Renault’s engineers opted to install a pair of electric motors combining to deliver 375 hp and 516 lb-ft (700 Nm) of torque. Providing the motors with their juice is a 42 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, and impressively, Renault said the car weighs just 980 hp (2,160 lbs) and can hit 100 km/h (62 mph) in 3.5 seconds.

Renault has knocked it out of the park with the retro-themed 4 E-Tech and 5-Tech, and a bonkers super electric hatch could be the brand’s ultimate halo model. Fingers crossed.