Mmmmm, Renault wants to make its interiors out of pineapples

We definitely should have eaten more for breakfast this morning, because Renault’s latest interior development is making us very hungry indeed.

It has just told us that, in collaboration with automotive supplier Forvia, it is working on interior trim that’s made from pineapples. Yep, your Clio could be about to get a whole lot more tropical.

Well, kinda. The juicy fruity bits won’t be adorning your dashboard any time soon unless there’s an accident with the snack section of your meal deal (although let’s be honest, you shouldn’t be picking anything other than a packet of crisps). Instead, Forvia is developing a hard-wearing fabric for door cards and dashboards from pineapple leaf fibre.

Remember the Renault Emblème concept first unveiled back in October 2024? Essentially it’s a hydrogen hybrid estate car that’ll act as a rolling laboratory for Renault to try and reduce the cradle-to-grave lifetime CO2 emissions of its cars.

The French firm has recently been going into plenty of detail about just how it has achieved a 90 per cent reduction for the Emblème when compared with a petrol-engined 2019 Captur, and while lots of fancy scientific data was produced, TG was distracted by the pineapple-filled interior.

Don’t think this is just some concept car fantasy though, because we’re assured the Emblème is actually a working prototype. You might remember the production Volkswagen Fox used fibres from the curauá plant – a member of the pineapple family – for its roof lining and parcel shelf back in the mid-2000s.

“It’s not a concept car; it’s a demo car so everything must be feasible for full scale production,” says Benoit Taillandier, marketing director at Forvia.

Forvia could actually make this happen too. It’s a giant parts manufacturer with over 80 automotive customers and around 13,000 patents. One in every two vehicles produced worldwide uses at least one of its products. Taillandier points out that not only is the pineapple fibre a low CO2 material that’s an alternative to animal leather, but producing it doesn’t sit in competition with the growing of human food.

On the Emblème, Forvia has also used linen made in Normandy for the dashboard, and it reckons it has reduced the lifetime CO2 emissions of the instrument panel, the door cards and the centre console by a whopping 72 per cent compared to a previous gen Megane from 2020.

Reckon fruity interiors could be the future for family cars?