Renault's cars have an excellent reputation for traveling comfort. What are you working on now to keep your competitive edge?

I will list two main areas:

• Connectivity: We must take into account the changes in people's behavior. Sixty percent of telephone calls today involve someone in a car.
• Comfort: We want to find the optimal balance between comfort and respect for the environment. It's not a widely known fact but, with certain vehicles, it takes more energy to keep the occupants comfortable than to move them around.

Aren't cars already too well connected, and isn't that detrimental to safety?

When in comes to research, all carmakers are working more or less in the same general areas. For a specific system, the difference will lie in how easy it is to interact with it. For example, the issue with on-board telephony is not just to have a hands-free system like the ones for pedestrians, but to have a system designed for cars that will be safer for everyone.

In the area of comfort, cars are being loaded up with new features. Isn't this being done at the expense of energy efficiency and the environment?

This is one of the big problems that we are trying to solve with our current research. How to improve convenience and traveling comfort at a time when everyone is working to design vehicles that are more energy efficient? Renault's future vehicles will consume less energy and be even more comfortable than today's models. A good illustration of this is the air conditioning. The present system cools really well, but it eats up a relatively large quantity of fuel doing it. The air conditioning in Renault's future vehicles will be designed completely differently so as to consume less energy.