JOYS OF SPRING(some text hidden)

By Jonathan Crouch

Ten Second Review word count: 54

Dacia shakes up the affordable end of the EV market with this car, the Spring. The driving range is modest, but then so also is the price. This Romanian contender is fun to look at - and to drive. Here at last is an EV small hatch more comparably priced to a combustion model.

Background word count: 157

Electric cars are too expensive. That's the bottom line. Despite continued industry promises, we're still waiting for the required wave of small, affordable EVs priced more comparably with fossil-fuelled runabouts. If any car maker was going to provide such a thing, you'd hope it might be Dacia, Renault's Romanian budget brand, who shook up the market a decade ago by offering UK folk a new family hatchback (the Sandero) for under £6,000. In fact, they already have, launching Europe's cheapest electric car, the Spring, back in 2021. Early versions of that model never appeared here, but Dacia is taking the opportunity provided by this model line's facelift to introduce it for the British market. The Spring is assembled in China as part of a joint venture between the Nissen Renault Alliance and the DongFeng Motor Group. And over 120,000 have been sold across Europe so far. So what might be its prospects here? Let's take a look.