Six years ago, after more than four decades with
Renault SA, Gérard Détourbet decided he was done. He was in Chennai, leading a group of engineers from Renault and its strategic partner,
Nissan Motor Co., in an attempt to create a low-cost vehicle for the Indian market, when some of his employees left his team rather than make cost-cutting modifications they found impractical. “It pissed me off,” he recalls. He sent a letter to Carlos Ghosn, then at the helm of the Renault-Nissan partnership, saying he was headed back to Paris without further notice.
It wasn’t the first time he’d done such a thing—in fact, it was Détourbet’s fifth resignation. That none of them was accepted is a testament to his value at Renault. After extracting a promise of total autonomy from Ghosn, Détourbet went on to produce the
Kwid, a $4,000 hatchback that by 2017 represented about 82 percent of the brand’s sales in India. “What he’s done in the past 10 years explains the bulk of Renault’s rebirth as a profitable company that is able to expand outside Europe,” says consultant Bernard Jullien, the former director of French automotive think tank Gerpisa. Today, no-frills cars such as the Kwid deliver 35 percent of the carmaker’s total sales.
Born and raised in Paris, Détourbet studied math until the violent student demonstrations of 1968 roiled the city’s university community. He decided to leave academia and soon got a job in the IT department at Renault. Even today, “cars don’t make me dream,” he says. He’s always had an obsession with price, however.
The Kwid lacks many of the amenities considered standard in a consumer vehicle. Drivers have to stick their hand out the window to adjust the side mirrors, for instance, which saved Renault a few cents per vehicle. Safety isn’t necessarily a priority, either: The Indian version of the Renault Duster, another Détourbet project, scored
zero out of five stars in an international crash test. (Renault says all its vehicles meet or exceed the safety standards set by Indian regulatory authorities.)
So far the Kwid is available in only a handful of countries, including Brazil and Indonesia; its next big market is Iran. Meanwhile, Détourbet is plotting another feat: a no-frills electric car for the Chinese market, planned for 2019. That’s a tight timeline, which may cause tempers to flare. “Many engineers come to me because they want to work with me,” he says. “But there are others that I pissed off so much that they don’t even feel like it.”