Dacia Spring review

When you’re working at the office or away from home, one of the most important questions of the day is ‘What’s for lunch?’. Sure, you could treat yourself to a takeaway, but a supermarket meal deal contains all the key components for a lot less money. The Dacia Spring electric car (EV) is, in effect, the meal deal – giving you all the essentials for a price that massively undercuts those of key rivals.

Indeed, it's cheaper than our current favourite small electric model, the MG4 EV, as well as the Fiat 500 Electric and the recently released Citroën ë-C3, making it the cheapest new electric car you can buy.

Sounds tempting. But to keep the price low, the ingredients that have gone into the Spring are more Iceland than Waitrose. We’re talking about a car with just four seats, steel (rather than alloy) wheels, a tiny 26.8kWh battery, an official range of just 140 miles, a motor with a maximum power output of 64bhp and a maximum charging rate of 30kW.

After being on sale in Europe for a few years, the Spring is finally available in the UK in an updated form. It looks, on paper at least, like something of a halfway house between a quadricycle like a Citroën Ami, and a full-sized EV like the ë-C3. But perhaps that is no bad thing? Dacia says its customers travel an average of 23 miles a day, and for those people, the Spring’s projected range is plenty. Plus the outgoing car sold like hot cakes in Europe.

So, stay with us to find out if the Spring satisfies our appetite at a bargain price...

All versions of the Spring get a small 26.8kWh battery, but you do get to choose between two motor outputs: 44bhp (Electric 45) or 64bhp (Electric 65).

We’ve yet to sample the less powerful car, but its claimed 0-62mph time of 19.1 seconds looks positively glacial. So unless you live in the centre of a city where you’re unlikely to venture above 30mph, we’d discount it in favour of the Electric 65. Because, while the more powerful car’s official 0-62mph time of 14 seconds doesn’t sound particularly quick (a Citroën ë-C3 is nearly four seconds quicker to 62mph), it feels punchier than you’d expect from behind the wheel.

From 0-40mph, it piles on speed with genuine enthusiasm, before tailing off quite noticeably as you close in on the national speed limit. Not that you’d ever want to drive the Spring in a particularly spirited manner, because the steering is both devoid of feel and very vague. This isn’t a problem in the city, where the light steering makes navigating tight streets a relative breeze, but it’s incredibly difficult to place the car with any real accuracy at higher speeds on a country road.

It’s a similar story when it comes to the Spring’s suspension. Around town, the little Dacia does a good job of soaking up impacts from potholes and raised ironwork. However, when you build up speed, it grows choppy and begins to pogo its way down the road. Combine this with considerable body lean and the Spring robs its driver of confidence, as well as risking motion-sickness in passengers.

It also doesn’t help that the Spring is noisier than all of its rivals at around 50mph and faster, drumming up a surprising amount of wind and road noise. Long trips, then, are likely to be tiring for all on board, so perhaps it’s not a bad thing that you’ll be forced to stop regularly to recharge the tiny battery. The official range is a rather underwhelming 140 miles, which is around 50 less than you get from an ë-C3 and around 75 miles less than a Peugeot e-208.

Considering the bargain-basement price point of the Spring, Dacia’s designers deserve a pat on the back for creating an interior that looks modern and in keeping with the rest of the Dacia line-up. With attractive details, such as the hexagonal steering wheel, Y-shaped air vents and flashes of bronze trim (on top-level Extreme models), the Spring certainly looks less austere inside than an MG4.

However, once you start to interact with your surroundings it's impossible to ignore that nearly all of the interior plastics are hard and scratchy. To an extent this is also the case in the Citroën ë-C3, but that car at least benefits from a broader variety of surface textures, including a dashboard covered in recycled fabric.

On a more positive note, the Spring’s interior design makes good sense in city traffic; the driver’s seat is set relatively high, giving you a slightly elevated view at junctions that’s helped by relatively tall windows and narrow pillars. We love, too, that most functions – including adjusting the temperature and turning off the safety assist functions (using the customisable Safety Peso button) – can be operated via physical buttons.

However, finding a comfortable driving position can be tricky, because the steering wheel only adjusts for height, so longer-legged drivers might have to sit uncomfortably close to the pedals to reach the wheel. And while over-the-shoulder visibility is better than in most rivals, the rear-view camera is low in resolution, while the front and rear parking sensors are a bit hyperactive (base Expression trim cars get only rear sensors). 

Infotainment-wise, base-spec cars come with a dashboard clip for mounting your smartphone (a bit like you used to get on the discontinued Volkswagen Up), while Extreme models get a perfectly adequate 10.0in touchscreen. It’s mounted high up on the dashboard so it’s easy to read on the move, the layout is pretty intuitive and it also comes with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. That’s a good thing, because the in-built sat-nav is woefully slow in use. 

The Spring is a physically small car, so font-seat occupants will need to get used to occasionally brushing legs with each other. There’s also very little elbow room, and it’s a shame that there’s no central armrest. There is, however, lots of storage space on offer; the glovebox is sizeable, there’s an extra large cubby carved into the dashboard and the door bins are massive.

There is 33 litres of storage available in total, but if you want a touch more practicality, you can also specify Dacia’s YouClip system. This provides you with multiple anchor points (two on the centre console and one on the dashboard) that enable you to attach useful items, such as a smartphone holder, a torch, a cupholder or a bag hook.

The Spring’s rear doors make it easier to access the rear seats than it would be to climb into the back of a three-door Fiat 500 Electric or Mini Cooper Electric. However, once you get seated, you’ll find that there is very little leg room, even for a passenger of average height. And don’t even think of carrying a fourth passenger – because you can’t. Unlike in a Citroën ë-C3 or MG4, there is no middle seat or centre belt.

The boot, however, is a bit more impressive at 308 litres. That means it’s bigger than those of the Mini and Ora 03, and on par with the ë-C3. In real-world terms, it gives you enough space to fit a week’s worth of shopping, but it is worth noting that the boot opening is quite small and it has a high load lip, which makes loading in heavy items a bit of a chore.

The rear seats also don’t do anything remotely clever, and they fold down in one piece, leaving a step up from the recessed boot floor (rather than creating a long, flat load area). There’s also no hidden cable storage compartment under the boot floor. However, Dacia has at least come up with a solution; If you’re willing to pay a little extra, you can have a dedicated charging cable holder under the front bonnet. It’s basic, and unlike the one on the Alfa Romeo Junior, it isn’t covered, but it does the job.

If we disqualify quadricycles like the Citroën Ami, you won’t find a new electric car that undercuts the starting price of the Dacia Spring. Even the range-topping Spring comes in significantly cheaper than an entry-level BYD Dolphin, Citroën ë-C3, MG4, Mini Cooper Electric or Ora 03.

Two trim levels are offered for the Spring: Expression and Extreme. Expression gets the bare essentials, such as cruise control, steering wheel-mounted controls, electric front windows and rear parking sensors.

We prefer Extreme trim. It’s available only in conjunction with the Electric 65 powertrain, but you get some really useful additions, including electrically adjustable mirrors, electric rear windows, vehicle-to-load (V2L) charging and a 10.0in infotainment system.

Because the Spring is the lightest electric car currently on sale, it is pleasingly efficient. During our test drive, it returned an efficiency of 4.3 miles per kWh, giving it a rough real-world range of 115 miles. If you plan on staying in the city, that could be just fine.

But what if you want to venture out on a long-distance road trip? Well, our advice would be to take another car. Because, while a small battery, should, in theory, be quick to charge, the 26.8kWh unit in the Spring is restricted by a 30kW maximum charging rate – that’s slower than all of its closest rivals. It means that the Spring takes around 45 minutes to charge from 20-80% – 20 minutes longer than the ë-C3, which can charge at up to 100kW.

That said, this is a city car and we suspect most people will charge it from home. From a 3-pin plug, you’ll get a 20-100% charge in around 11 hours, and it’ll take 4 hours for the same charge if you have a 7kW wallbox. Not bad.

This latest version of the Spring has not been tested by the safety experts at Euro NCAP and therefore it inherits the one-star safety rating of the pre-facelift model that was available in Europe previously. This reluctance to re-test the car indicates to us that Dacia isn’t confident in how well the Spring physically protects passengers, given that this latest version packs lane-keeping assistance, speed-limit recognition, a driver attention alert system and autonomous emergency braking (AEB). 

Dacia gives you a standard three-year, 60,000-mile warranty on the car, while its battery is covered for eight years and 75,000 miles.

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