Our cars: Dacia Sandero - May

Dacia Sandero 0.9 TCe Laureate

Week ending May 17
Mileage 2675
Driven this week 75 miles

Read the full Dacia Sandero review

Rain has highlighted an annoying trait of the Sandero. Every time that the wipers swipe across the windscreen, there is a click from inside the dashboard. I'm not entirely sure what it is but it probably has something to do with the wiper mechanism. Whatever the cause, it gets pretty annoying, pretty quickly.

I thought that this was unique to the Sandero and something to be expected of low-cost motoring, until I drove home in the Lotus Evora. It does exactly the same thing despite costing over five times more.

By Matthew Burrow


Week ending May 10
Mileage 2600
Driven this week 217 miles

The bank holiday weekend provided the perfect opportunity for the Sandero to stretch its legs. It spends most of its time in commuter traffic, so a trip to the coast was a good break for it and its driver.

At first I thought that the 0.9-litre engine would struggle on the motorway, but it never felt underpowered and was able to keep up with the rest of the traffic.

The Dacia is not as refined as some of the competition – road noise intrudes – but the radio does a good job of drowning out the majority of that.

Our Laureate-spec car has cruise control as standard which was very welcome in roadworks monitored by average speed cameras. Once I had figured out how to use it, that is. First you need to press a button, which is low down on the centre console to turn on the system and then you use the buttons on the wheel to set and change the speed. Easy when you know how, but confusing to the uninitiated.

By Matthew Burrow