by Gilles Guillaume

PARIS (Reuters) – Renault has chosen a fighter jet name, “Rafale”, for its new large top-of-the-range coupé, one of the flagship models of the vast renewal of the diamond group’s offer to increase its margins .

Engaged in a drastic strategic overhaul with the separation of its electric activities and its thermal engines, the French car manufacturer announced on Tuesday that its future large SUV coupé would be called “Rafale”, a nod to Renault’s past in aviation .

The car will even be revealed in June at the 54th International Aeronautics and Space Show in Le Bourget, north of Paris.

Hybrid motor vehicle, it is one of the 18 launches planned by the Renault group by the end of 2025. According to a source close to the group, the car will be assembled in Palencia (Spain), alongside the Austral and Space.

Renault declined to comment on where it was made.

“Few people know it, but the name Rafale belongs to Renault,” said Sylvia Dos-Santos, head of naming strategy in the marketing department of the diamond brand, quoted in a press release.

Property of the automotive group since 1936, the name Rafale – also used by the Dassault Aviation fighter plane under an agreement known as “co-existence” of names – was carried by the device on board which the champion Hélène Boucher broke the women’s world speed record over 1,000 kilometers in 1934 by reaching 445 kilometers per hour.

The famous aviator had died the same year, at the age of 26, aboard a Caudron C.430 Rafale which had crashed in a wood in Yvelines, not far from the training tracks of the Caudron Renault aerodrome in Guyancourt, where the manufacturer’s Technocentre has since moved.

(Gilles Guillaume report, edited by Blandine Hénault)

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