ARCHIVEBridgestone Makes Ultra Performance Visible Through AI Art
How Bridgestone 's Master The Art of Ultra Performance Reframes Tire Performance as Creative...
Renault Megane E-Tech Takes the Road Movie Electric in 2024
Renault's 'On the Road, with New Energy' is a 2024 French automotive campaign that places the Megane E-Tech 100% electric hatchback inside recreated scenes from Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise, using a shot-reverse-shot technique to position the electric vehicle as a natural successor to the petrol-era road movie.
The campaign, developed with agency Publicis Conseil and published on 10 January 2024, is built around a single film in which the Renault Megane E-Tech shares desert roads with the iconic characters of two landmark cinema works. The driver of the Megane passes, overtakes and follows these fictional travellers across the wide open landscapes synonymous with American road movies, before the narrative diverges at a service station: the cult characters stop, and the 100% electric Renault Megane E-Tech continues without hesitation. That moment of departure carries the campaign's entire argumentative weight, translating the car's claimed range of up to 470 kilometres under the WLTP standard into a cinematic gesture rather than a specification sheet.
In France, the Megane E-Tech occupies the C-segment as Renault's flagship 100% electric hatchback, aimed at both private and professional drivers. It carries a 220 hp, 160 kW E-Tech 100% electric engine, regenerative braking via steering-wheel-mounted paddles, integrated Google Maps route planning through the openR link system, and more than 30 safety features — all communicated not through direct product demonstration in this campaign, but through the symbolic endurance of the road-movie narrative. The campaign is anchored within the Renaulution strategic plan, which Renault launched in 2021 to reposition the brand toward electric mobility and technology, as documented by Clapboard. The Megane E-Tech is presented as the first vehicle to emerge from that plan, making this 2024 campaign both a product moment and a broader brand statement about what electric driving looks and feels like. Clapboard rates the campaign 63 out of 100.
Renault positions the Megane E-Tech 100% electric against a backdrop of accelerating market transformation in France and across Europe. According to the International Energy Agency, electric vehicles represented more than 25 percent of new-car sales across Europe in 2024, a market dynamic that places French manufacturers under direct competitive pressure from both domestic and international rivals. In France specifically, the electric vehicle segment has grown to the point where C-segment choices have multiplied, with competitors including Volkswagen's ID.3 and the Tesla Model 3 occupying comparable positioning as premium electric hatchbacks and saloons targeting the same private and professional driver base.
The strategic insight driving 'On the Road, with New Energy' is rooted in a long-standing consumer ambivalence about electric vehicles: the perception that they constrain rather than liberate. The road movie genre — particularly as embodied by Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise — is culturally encoded as the purest expression of automotive freedom, independence and the open horizon. By placing the Renault Megane E-Tech 100% electric inside that mythology, Publicis Conseil attacks the anxiety at its source, substituting the image of limitation with the image of continuation and freedom.
This approach also serves the broader Renaulution narrative, which Renault established in 2021 as a repositioning toward technology and clean energy, as documented by Clapboard. The Megane E-Tech's up-to-470-kilometre WLTP range, cited in campaign materials, becomes persuasive not as a number but as a behavioural proof: the Megane does not stop where the others do. According to the IEA, global electric-car sales reached more than 17 million units in 2024, with electric vehicles accounting for more than 20 percent of global new-car sales — context that makes range credibility a decisive battleground in any 2024 electric vehicle campaign targeting France.
Director Frédéric Planchon of production company Iconoclast leads the creative execution of 'On the Road, with New Energy.' Planchon's central technical device is the shot-reverse-shot, or champ contre-champ as identified by CB News in its coverage of the campaign published on 7 January 2024, which allows the Renault Megane E-Tech to appear in authentic visual dialogue with footage and aesthetic references drawn from Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise. The effect is one of cohabitation rather than parody: the Megane does not mock the originals but travels alongside them, asserting its right to the same cinematic space.
The production recreates the wide desert roads, golden light and open-sky compositions that define both source films — visual grammar that French and international audiences instantly recognise as belonging to a specific tradition of automotive freedom on screen. The Renault Megane E-Tech is photographed with the same spatial generosity as its fictional companions, neither dwarfed by the landscape nor isolated from the cultural conversation the film is staging.
The soundtrack reinforces this dialogue between eras. The campaign uses a remixed version of 'Psyché Rock,' the 1967 composition by Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, as documented in campaign credits. The choice is deliberate: Pierre Henry was a foundational figure in musique concrète, a composer who worked with the sounds of machines and electricity, making his work an oblique but resonant score for an electric vehicle campaign. The remix keeps the track's kinetic energy while signalling modernity — the same structural argument the film makes visually. As reported by lareclame.fr, Arnaud Belloni, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Renault, framed the Megane E-Tech as the hatch built for those who genuinely hit the road, a statement that aligns the product promise directly with the campaign's cinematic ambition.
No independently verified third-party performance data for 'On the Road, with New Energy' — including reach figures, view counts, or sales attribution — is publicly available at the time of writing. The campaign's effectiveness must therefore be assessed through its structural properties and the competitive context it operates within.
The film's deployment of recognisable cinematic references from Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise gives it immediate cultural legibility in France and across European markets where both films retain strong recognition, reducing the cognitive effort required to decode the campaign's argument about electric range and freedom. CB News identified the champ contre-champ device as the campaign's defining creative mechanism, noting its role in integrating the Megane E-Tech into the visual language of road-movie history, a level of trade-press attention that itself signals creative distinctiveness within the French automotive advertising landscape.
The Renault Megane E-Tech was first introduced in mid-2022, as reported by Beev Co, meaning this 2024 campaign arrives as a brand-building effort for an established product rather than a launch communication — a context in which emotional and cultural positioning typically carries more strategic weight than feature-led messaging. According to bestsellingcarsblog.com, the Megane E-Tech has competed in a crowded French C-segment electric market, making the decision to invest in cinematic storytelling over specification comparison a considered strategic choice. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a strong conceptual foundation and accomplished direction, balanced against the inherent risk of a borrowed-interest strategy that depends on the audience's relationship with decades-old source material.
'On the Road, with New Energy' is a 2024 Renault campaign for the Megane E-Tech 100% electric, created by Publicis Conseil and published on 10 January 2024 in France. The film places the Megane E-Tech inside recreated scenes from Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise, using a shot-reverse-shot technique to position electric driving as cinematic freedom.
Frédéric Planchon of production company Iconoclast directed the campaign film. Planchon used the champ contre-champ technique to place the Renault Megane E-Tech in visual dialogue with scenes drawn from Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise, as identified in coverage by CB News published on 7 January 2024.
The campaign uses a remixed version of 'Psyché Rock,' composed by Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier in 1967. The track's origins in musique concrète — a tradition built on machine and electronic sounds — make it a thematically resonant choice for a 100% electric vehicle campaign targeting the French market in 2024.
Renault launched the Renaulution strategic plan in 2021 to reposition the brand toward electric mobility and technology, as documented by Clapboard. The Renault Megane E-Tech 100% electric is presented as the first vehicle to emerge from that plan, making the 2024 'On the Road, with New Energy' campaign both a product communication and a Renaulution brand milestone.
Clapboard rates 'On the Road, with New Energy' 63 out of 100. The score reflects a strong conceptual foundation and accomplished direction by Frédéric Planchon, balanced against the strategic risk of a borrowed-interest approach that depends on audience familiarity with Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise as cultural reference points.
The campaign addresses range anxiety through narrative rather than specification. The Megane E-Tech's claimed range of up to 470 kilometres under the WLTP standard is communicated by having the car continue its journey while the characters from Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise stop at a service station, translating endurance into a cinematic image rather than a data point.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
