Behold: the very new, very cheap and very excellent electric Dacia Spring

Dacia has revealed a new car that’s slower than continental drift, features less power than your average sneeze, and is heavier than it was before.

Welcome then, to perhaps one of the finest new vehicles to emerge from 2024’s already hellish hellscape! It’s the new Dacia Spring!

Making its debut in right-hand-drive for the very first time is the new, thoroughly updated version of Dacia’s very first fully-electric car; a car that, in Euro-spec, earned TopGear.com’s ‘Bargain of the Year’ award 2023. Principally because when prices are revealed next month, we suspect they’ll start from well under £18k.

That’ll make it the UK’s cheapest new EV – assuming you strike the Citroen Ami from that list, which isn’t really a… V – and in terms of a Full Entire Car, you get a lot. Including Dacia’s new design language first seen on the Duster, which it calls ‘robust’.

It certainly looks very clean: upright and with a great stance, there’s a sculpted bonnet, gloss black ‘bands’ front and back, full LED lights and 15in steelies with wheel covers. And built as it is for city living, there’s easily replaceable door protection, too.

There’s been a sweeping change across the entire cabin. Out goes the rather dated-looking design and central interface, and in comes a much more modern layout, with a customisable seven-inch display (or 10in in higher spec Springs), better material quality and colour choices, and, frankly, a better design. And praise be: the temperature and fan controls remain real life, actual dials.

Careful how you deploy them, mind: the lil’ Spring gets but a 26.8kWh battery, powering a 48kW (64bhp) electric motor. And yes, it is heavier than the pre-facelift Spring… by a whopping 6kg, meaning the Full Entire Car weighs just 984kg.

As we’ve discussed in our review of the outgoing Spring, the battery can afford to be small, because the car’s light, which in turn makes everything else light. Dacia also says customers travel an average of 23 miles a day, meaning the new Spring’s claimed, projected range (pending certification) of 137 miles is plenty.

There’s now regen braking and ADAS functionality on board for the first time, and it'll fast charge from 20-80 per cent in 45 minutes on a 30kW charger, and... slowly get to 62mph in less than 14 seconds. ‘Less than’, OK? Not ‘more than’, so that’s something.

What you get more of is interior space. Plus new, handy accessory clips. A small footprint. A large turning circle. And a five-star Green NCAP rating.

The Spring very quickly became Europe’s third best-selling EV in 2022 and 2023, with more than 140k delivered. Numbers this newer, slower, less powerful and heavier version will quickly add to, no doubt.