Tag Archives: Dacia

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Dacia Bets on Choice with Dual A-Segment EV Strategy

Dacia is about to pull off a neat little trick in the bargain-basement EV space—sell two electric city cars at the same time and make it look intentional.

In the coming months, the Renault-owned brand will unveil a new A-segment EV based on the upcoming electric Twingo, with a public debut locked in for the Paris motor show this September. It’ll hit European showrooms by year’s end with a targeted starting price below €18,000 (about £15,000), which already sounds like a mic drop in today’s inflation-happy EV market. But here’s the twist: the new car won’t immediately replace the Spring. Instead, Dacia plans to keep both on sale, making it the only automaker willing to hedge its city-EV bets so openly.

Think of it as the Clio-and-Sandero playbook, but electrified. The new entry-level EV borrows heavily from the Twingo’s bones, yet wears bespoke Dacia styling and undercuts its Renault cousin on price. Officially, it’s positioned as the Spring’s successor—but Dacia’s bosses are quick to point out that succession doesn’t necessarily mean eviction.

“They are still quite different,” said Dacia product chief Patrice Lévy-Bencheton, hinting that the distinction will be obvious once the car is revealed. Size and shape will do some of the differentiating work. At roughly 3.8 meters long and 1.7 meters wide, the new model will be slightly larger than the Spring and match the Twingo footprint. Design-wise, early previews suggest a radical shift, ditching city-car cuteness in favor of the chunky, pseudo-4×4 aesthetic that’s become a Dacia calling card.

That extra presence comes with a price bump. The new EV is expected to start around £15,000—roughly £3,000 more than the cheapest Spring. Even so, both cars will live in the same A-segment, aimed at urban buyers who care less about Nürburgring lap times and more about monthly payments.

According to Lévy-Bencheton, the overlap will last about a year, with the Spring being phased out market by market depending on incentives, regulations, and demand. Translation: Dacia will let customers vote with their wallets.

Sales and marketing boss Frank Marotte was even more blunt. The cars will sit at different price points, wear different designs, and then—shrug—“we’ll figure out what the customer will buy.” Refreshingly honest, that.

There’s also a geopolitical subplot here. The Spring is essentially a rebadged Renault City K-ZE, built in China and lightly adapted for Europe. That means it’s now subject to the EU’s hefty tariffs on Chinese-built EVs. The new model, by contrast, was designed in Europe for European buyers and will likely be built alongside the Twingo in Slovenia. No tariffs, better margins, fewer political headaches.

What makes this strategy particularly odd—in a good way—is the timing. Dacia has just given the Spring a significant refresh for 2026, despite it entering its seventh year on sale and staring down its so-called replacement. Power is up across both drivetrains, with the top version now delivering 101 horsepower. Charging speeds have improved. Suspension tweaks promise better handling. In short, Dacia addressed many of the Spring’s most common European complaints just months before introducing another car to steal its thunder.

Marotte admits it looks strange. Updating a car this late in its life cycle usually signals either desperation or indecision. But Dacia insists it’s about protecting residual values and keeping the Spring commercially relevant in an EV market that moves at smartphone speed.

“In the BEV world, if you want to sustain your residual values, you need to upgrade your product,” Marotte said. Fall behind on tech, and depreciation comes fast and hard. Dacia’s solution? Keep upgrading, even if the replacement is already waiting in the wings.

The result is an unusual but very on-brand strategy: maximum choice, minimum pretension, and prices that still feel like a rebuke to the rest of the industry. Two electric city cars, one showroom, and a sales team tasked with letting the market sort it out. In today’s EV landscape, that might be the most radical idea of all.

Source: Dacia

News

Bring Back the Box: Why the MPV Deserves a 2026 Comeback

Does your washing machine come with a raised ride height? Would you pay extra for a storage unit with a rakish roofline? Do your Amazon parcels arrive sporting flared wheel arches and a “sport” trim badge? Of course not. When it comes to moving people and stuff, the truth is stubbornly simple: boxy works. Always has.

And yet, family-car buyers in the UK—and pretty much everywhere else—have collectively decided that what they really need is an SUV. A tall one. A chunky one. Preferably with fake skid plates and wheels that look like they were borrowed from a Tonka truck. In making that choice, they’ve traded space efficiency and real-world practicality for something they believe looks fashionable. Whether SUVs are still “cool” when literally everyone, including your grandmother and her bridge club, drives one is very much up for debate.

What’s beyond debate is what we lost along the way.

The Multi-Purpose Vehicle—long the unsung hero of family transport—has been pushed to the margins. Once-familiar names like Zafira, Galaxy, Picasso, and Voyager have quietly slipped into history. Even the Renault Scenic, for years the poster child of sensible European family motoring, has shape-shifted into an SUV. If you want a new MPV today, your options are mostly limited to vans with windows and seats bolted in.

To be fair, modern van-based people movers are far better than their ancestors. They’re refined, surprisingly decent to drive, and massively practical. But no matter how plush the seats or how clever the infotainment, there’s still a lingering school-minibus vibe you can’t quite shake.

Which is why a recent six-month stint with Volkswagen’s ID. Buzz felt like a reminder from the past—and maybe a postcard from the future. Yes, there’s a Cargo version, but crucially the Buzz is based on a passenger-car EV platform, not a commercial vehicle shell. And it proves something MPV fans have known all along: if your goal is to fit people and their belongings inside a vehicle, nothing beats a purpose-built box on wheels.

The Buzz isn’t perfect, and it isn’t cheap, but its basic philosophy is spot-on. Upright sides. A tall roof that’s actually usable. Seating that works with the laws of physics instead of against them. You don’t climb up into it or fall down out of it—you just get in. What a concept.

Encouragingly, there are signs that manufacturers might be rediscovering this forgotten logic. Kia has rolled out the PV5. Lexus sells the ultra-luxurious LM. Volvo has the EM90. In China, premium MPVs like the Zeekr Mix and Denza D9 are thriving, quietly proving there’s real demand for vehicles that prioritize space, comfort, and flexibility over aggressive styling cues. Mercedes is also lining up the VLE, another signal that the segment isn’t as dead as it once appeared.

The catch? Most of these are large, expensive, or aimed at markets outside the UK. But shrink those ideas down. Make them affordable. Pitch them as mid-size family cars rather than luxury lounges. Do that, and it’s not hard to imagine serious sales volume.

Which brings us to a modest proposal: 2026 should be the year of the MPV revival.

Not the dowdy, beige boxes of old, but modern, intelligently designed people movers that lean into what they do best. Cars with genuinely flexible seating systems, sliding doors that make school runs painless, clever storage solutions, and interiors that can morph from family shuttle to DIY hauler in minutes. Wrap it all in clean, understated styling, and suddenly “practical” doesn’t have to mean “boring.”

SUVs, after all, have become the cane toads of the automotive ecosystem. They evolved an early advantage—buyers liked the look, manufacturers liked the margins—and promptly multiplied until they crowded out nearly everything else. Now the market is awash with big faces, bluff noses, and vehicles that promise adventure but rarely venture beyond a speed bump.

The MPV can be the antidote. It’s more useful than an SUV unless you genuinely go off-road. It’s more honest about its mission. And unlike SUVs, it isn’t burdened with awkward questions about efficiency penalties, unnecessary weight, or why you need all-wheel drive to do the weekly shop.

Most of all, more MPVs would bring something the family-car market sorely lacks: choice. Real choice. Not just the same tall hatchback in slightly different outfits.

While we’re at it, let’s also bring back a few estates. But that’s a crusade for another day.

For now, the message is simple. The box was never the problem. We just forgot how good it was.

Source: Auto Express

News

New Dacia Sandero Opens UK Order Books, Hybrid Stepway Confirmed

Order books have opened in the UK for the latest Dacia Sandero, reaffirming the Romanian brand’s iron grip on the budget end of the market. Prices start at just £14,765 for the standard supermini, while the tougher-looking Sandero Stepway commands a modest premium, kicking off at £16,065.

Those figures ensure the Sandero remains one of the cheapest new cars on sale in Britain, even if it has recently been undercut by Dacia’s own all-electric Spring following the introduction of new discounts. Still, for buyers seeking a conventional petrol-powered hatchback, the Sandero continues to represent remarkable value.

At launch, the updated Sandero range will be offered exclusively with a turbocharged 1.0-litre three-cylinder petrol engine, available in two states of tune producing either 99bhp or 108bhp. However, electrification is firmly on the roadmap. As part of a mid-life update expected in around a year’s time, Dacia will introduce a hybrid option – though only for the range-topping Sandero Stepway.

The Stepway will gain Dacia’s new Hybrid 155 powertrain, already seen in the larger Bigster SUV. It pairs a 108bhp four-cylinder petrol engine with a 49bhp electric motor and a starter-generator, delivering a combined output of 154bhp and 125lb ft of torque. That represents a substantial uplift over the current 108bhp petrol-only model.

The hybrid system uses a compact 1.4kWh battery to enable short bursts of electric-only driving and is paired with a clutchless automatic gearbox featuring four ratios for the combustion engine and two for the electric motor. While Dacia has yet to publish official performance or efficiency figures for the Sandero Stepway Hybrid 155, the same setup returned an impressive 72.4mpg in urban driving and around 55mpg at higher speeds in Autocar testing of the much larger Bigster. Given the Sandero’s lighter weight and smaller footprint, even better results are expected.

The hybrid Stepway is likely to carry a price premium of around £3000 over the equivalent petrol model, based on the difference between hybrid and non-hybrid versions of the related Jogger estate. Notably, there are currently no plans to offer the Hybrid 155 powertrain in the standard Sandero.

According to Dacia’s product performance boss, Patrice Lévy-Bencheton, affordability remains central to the Sandero’s appeal. Speaking to Autocar, he explained that Sandero and Stepway buyers have distinctly different priorities.

“What is very interesting is that customers for the Sandero and Sandero Stepway are quite different,” he said. “A Stepway customer will hesitate more with B-SUV offers on the market, so there is a bit more purchasing power. A Sandero customer is really hesitating with a simple B-hatch and is going for the best possible price on the market.”

While Lévy-Bencheton confirmed that adding the hybrid to the standard Sandero would be technically straightforward, he stressed that Dacia will wait to see whether the demand exists before taking that step.

The mechanical updates arrive alongside a series of styling and interior revisions across the Sandero, Sandero Stepway and Jogger ranges. On sale from November, all three models adopt a new LED lighting signature featuring an ‘inverted T’ design, paired with a revised grille and updated pixel-style rear lights. On the Jogger, the new rear light motif is designed to visually extend from the rear window.

The Jogger and Sandero Stepway also gain new exterior cladding made from Dacia’s ‘Starkle’ plastic, which incorporates 20% recycled material. New paint colours and alloy wheel designs further freshen up the range.

Inside, changes are subtle but meaningful. Buyers will find redesigned air vents, tougher fabric upholstery, a reshaped steering wheel aimed at improving ergonomics, and a revamped infotainment system built around a larger 10.0-inch central touchscreen, replacing the previous 8.0-inch display.

With sharp pricing, restrained but useful updates and the promise of an efficient hybrid in the Stepway, the latest Sandero looks well placed to maintain its position as one of Europe’s most popular and affordable cars.

Source: Autocar