Renault Espace Spied Looking Weird With Extended Wheel Arches

The debut of the sixth-generation Renault Espace is just around the corner. The French company has announced the family hauler will arrive on March 28 and we have one last batch of spy photos to share with you, showing a pre-production prototype before the big debut. It depicts the new Espace wearing bolt-on wheel arch extenders that look weird but probably hint at some unseen before design tweaks.

Those white plastic plates look totally out of place on this trial vehicle and we see two possible scenarios here. In the first one, Renault is simply trying to trick the untrained eye into believing this isn’t an Espace prototype but something else. More likely, however, we think there might be some small revisions to the wheel arches that the French company wants to keep hidden before the debut later this month. In any case, those large and fancy wheels look very good, though.

The new Espace isn’t exactly a brand-new model. Instead, it is just a stretched version of the Austral SUV with a length of 185.8 inches (4.72 meters), making it some 5.5 in (14 cm) shorter than the minivan it replaces. Despite that, thanks to clever packaging, Renault says the interior width of 97.6 in (2.48 m) will be larger. The new Espace will be sold in both five- and seven-seat versions and will effectively become Renault’s largest model on sale in Europe.

What will be under the hood? Well, as shocking as it may sound, an earlier teaser image of the new Espace showed the minivan-replacing SUV could borrow the hybridized 1.2-liter gas mill of the Austral where the output is either 160 horsepower or 200 hp thanks to electric motor support. Alternatively, the Austral’s 1.3-liter mild-hybrid gasoline engine with 140 hp and 160 hp should also be available, while a diesel option seems highly unlikely considering there’s no such engine available for the smaller SUV.

While the new Espace won't have much in common with its predecessors, which were all traditional minivans, we are excited to see the diamond logo brand launching a three-row model. With the slow and painful demise of the MPV segment in Europe, it doesn’t really come as a surprise that Renault has decided to ditch the once-popular single-volume shape for something more modern. All will be unveiled on March 28 this year.