The beginner's guide to Dacia

The Romanian government started Dacia back in 1966 under the watchful eye of communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. It was called UAP (Uzină de Autoturisme Piteşti, or Pitesti car factory) at first, even if the southern Romanian city didn’t have a car factory until 1968.

The first Dacias were knock-offs, this time of Renaults, but the plagiarism isn’t as simple as it first sounds. Dacia put its requirements out to tender and Renault won the bid, offering up its 12 model it was developing. Because it wasn’t ready, Dacia got the Renault 8 first, badged it the 1100 and had it on sale in 1968. The 12 became the Dacia 1300 in 1969 and the Romanians even launched their version a week before Renault.

Despite seven facelifts of the 1100 during its long production run from 1969 until 2004, it wasn’t until 1995 that the first fully in-house model from Pitesti went on sale. The Nova supermini had a saloon profile, but a nifty hatchback design.

Dacia’s salvation came in the form of a buyout by Renault in 1999 – the French carmaker needed a budget brand on a budget. The first model, the Logan, was business as usual for Dacia, but the launch of the Duster in 2010 heralded the arrival of middle class respectability.

You used to be able to get a Dacia Sandero (last gen, not the posher current one) for a headline grabbing £7,995, the cheapest car on sale in the UK. It had unpainted bumpers, steel wheels and no radio but it was an option. That not many people took up, funnily enough. Then Dacia decided it wanted to make some money from selling it, so now the entry model’s considerably pricier at £13,795, though still a bargain. It paints the bumpers on that one, and it comes with aircon, cruise control and electric front windows.

Hopefully you’re sitting down (it would be exhausting to still be standing this far), but the most expensive Dacia is a whopping £24,445. That’s for the 4x4 diesel Duster SUV in Extreme spec. For this you get styling tweaks reserved for the top spec, heated front seats, keyless entry and Apple/Android. Fancy.

The fastest Dacia currently on sale is the TCe 150 two-wheel drive Duster, which pumps out a prodigious 148bhp and scorches from zero to 62mph in a dizzying 9.7 seconds. You’d think maybe the new hybrid version of the Jogger would be able to overtake the Duster away from the lights, but sadly that car is 0.3secs slower to 62mph.

Of course when it comes to top speed the Jogger romps away from the sporty Duster, with a vmax of 111mph that trounces the Duster’s 108mph. Over 24 hours you could be a whole 72 miles further on in the Jogger.

Usually at this point we can make reference to a smoking hot racecar that the manufacturer has entered at some point into Le Mans – no such luck here. Instead we get the Dacia Logan one make series that ran from 2006 to 2019. Still, the logical next step is an F1 works team, right?

Dacia didn’t go in for concepts much back when it was communist, but French ownership has injected a certain something into the styling department. The Duster SUV was previewed in 2009 with a concept of the same name – the end car had little to do with the curvy lines of the teaser, but it was evidence of a brand on the up.

We particularly enjoyed 2022’s Manifesto concept (pictured above) – a windowless buggy with no hope of production, but it previewed Dacia’s lifestyle shift, with a chunky design and extensive use of recycled plastic inside. Dacia calls the new material ‘Starkle’, and it’ll feature from the new 2024 Duster onwards.

Dacia is currently living its best life – where Volkswagen’s takeover of Skoda brought something of a laughing stock into the German carmaker’s fold, Renault bagged itself a brand that was basically unknown in western Europe, but with a solid customer base in the east. There were years of jokes about Skodas, but it has hardly taken any time at all to boost Dacia’s fortunes and for it to assume the position previously occupied by the likes of Skoda, Kia and the rest in the Nineties.

Unlike those brands, while Dacia has always been a budget brand, it’s never been seen as cheap per se. Like certain punky German supermarket brands Dacia has managed to carve out a niche of middle class respectability, making it a badge of honour for those who look after their money well. The difficulty for the carmaker now will be to resist the urge to push upmarket like everyone else seems to want to do...

Do the company’s first 30 years count? Dacia was meant to be waving the industrial flag for the Socialist Republic of Romania, a project commissioned personally by dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. Presumably the irony of cocking a snook at the corrupt and incorrigible west by importing kits produced by a more capable company on the other side of the iron curtain was lost on the general secretary.

For most of those 30 years the Dacia range consisted of a number of models all spun off the same Renault 12 base, updated seven times during its life. The last model came off the line in a scarcely believable 2004, with just shy of two million sold and a month or two short of its 35th birthday. And yet, if Dacia hadn’t established itself as an assembler of Renault kit cars it probably would never have ended up on the French carmaker’s radar when it came time to expand the Renault empire.

Dacia came out fighting at the beginning of 2023 when news emerged that BMW was set to charge its drivers to unlock the heated seats in the firm’s cars – the carmaker offered free hot water bottles for two days at selected dealerships, so-called ‘heated seat saviour packages’ for anyone who might have been affected by the changes.

More broadly, though, it was the launch of the Jogger that sprung Dacia’s most recent surprises. It was news to the car world that the MPV wasn’t quite dead yet, with obituaries for the segment long gathering dust. But one so cheap and cheerful? Not to mention that in non-hybrid guise it’s actually a hoot to drive, with a simplicity lacking in almost every other car on sale these days. Of course, don’t mention the fact that it got a one-star Euro NCAP score. Another surprise – but not because the car was a deathtrap, more because it didn’t throw in expensive safety kit as standard.