Dacia Sandero Stepway review

All Stepways come with a height-adjustable driver’s seat with an armrest, plus a height and reach-adjustable steering wheel. That’s enough for you to get comfortable easily – regardless of how tall you are. You’ll find plenty of easy-to-use switches and knobs conveniently placed around the interior to control all the major functions, with no fiddly touch-sensitive ones, and easily readable instruments in front of you.

Your forward view is improved slightly by the raised ride height, and if you jack up the driver’s chair enough, you can just about convince yourself that you're in an SUV, albeit a very little one. The windscreen pillars aren't thick enough to get in the way, but those at the rear are rather chunky. That’s actually one of the reasons why we’d recommend Comfort trim, which gives you rear parking sensors. Impressively, all Stepways have powerful LED headlights as standard, while Prestige trim adds front parking sensors and a rear-view camera.

Essential trim gets a DAB radio, Bluetooth and two speakers, although it's still a relatively basic system by modern standards, with no touchscreen interface.

Comfort trim and up adds an 8.0in colour touchscreen system with built-in sat-nav, along with Apple CarPlay/Android Auto smartphone mirroring that you can sync your phone to wirelessly, saving you the bother of plugging it in to the USB socket on short journeys.

The screen is mounted helpfully high up on the dashboard and is tilted towards the driver, with some touch-sensitive shortcut buttons down the side that you can use to directly switch between functions. We’d prefer physical shortcut buttons, but the operating system is easy to get your head around and responds quickly to prods and swipes.