Dacia Is Working On A New Sub-£15k City Car

Ah, Dacia, never change. We’ve come to love the brand for offering cars that have just about the right amount of things you need, a lot of the stuff you don’t really and for prices that don’t make you rock backwards and forwards looking at them. Thankfully, none of that seems to be changing soon as the brand has announced it’s working on a new sub-£15k city car.

Speaking at the Renault Group’s 2024 financial results press conference, CEO Luca De Meo confirmed a new ‘A-segment EV’ is in the works with a target price below £15,000.

It’ll be built in Europe, unlike the current Chinese-built Spring, and it shouldn’t take long to come to market either. De Meo has stated the car will take less than 16 months to develop. He added: “I would defy any competitor to do that, including the Chinese.”

Beyond those headline details, we don’t know anything yet about the car. A basic sketch of the car has been released, showing a boxy side profile and the squared-off looking lights we've come to expect of recent Dacia models.

If we’re to speculate, we’d expect this to be a replacement for the existing Spring rather than sitting alongside it. It may make sense for the name to continue as a second generation, but we can’t say for certain at this stage.

That short development window would suggest the new Dacia will be sprung (pun intended) from another model within the Renault Group. Given the new Renault Twingo is on the horizon and would compete in the same segment if not the same price bracket, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest it could utilise much of that car’s underlying mechanical bits.

We’ll know for sure fairly soon, given how short that planned development window is. It comes as Dacia is in the midst of expanding its lineup both literally and figuratively, with the large Bigster recently going on sale.