Dacia Spring electric: price, specs and release date

• Dacia Spring Electric considered for UK sale
• 78mph top speed, 140-mile range and 1 hour charging time
• £15,000 starting price targeted

The Dacia Spring Electric is already on sale in Europe, giving our contiental cousins a budget alternative to small EVs such as the Renault Zoe, Mini Electric and Honda e.

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Dacia Spring Electric price and release date

The Dacia Spring Electric is already on sale on the continent for €17,390. Convert that to pounds and factor in the Government’s £1,500 zero emissions car grant and a £15,000 price starts to look plausible. And highly attractive when you realise a bog-standard Renault Zoe EV costs from £27,595.

Dacia has yet to confirm that the Spring Electric will be sold in the UK, but it’s the best selling budget EV on the continent and, with EV sales soaring in the UK, it looks increasingly likely that the car could go on sale in the UK in less than a year.

Dacia Spring Electric exterior and interior

The Dacia Spring Electric will follow Dacia’s ‘genuine’ – you may call it ‘cheap and cheerful’ – design philosophy to the letter. Recycled black plastic trim pieces will be the order of the day and you can forget about fancy LED lighting that performs a welcome dance every time you unlock the car.

Instead, the Spring has a utility theme. Raised suspension makes it look like a baby SUV and will be handy for absorbing the speed humps and potholes the Dacia will likely encounter in the urban environments it’s designed. 

Plus you get plastic body cladding that should fend off runaway trolleys in the supermarket car park. Integrated roof bars, meanwhile, make it easy to extend the Spring’s luggage capacity with a roof box. 

The Spring’s shape is similar to the Dacia Sandero – although the two cars have different platforms – and you can expect to be able to specify the EV with bright highlights to appeal to the young urbanites the car is targeted at.

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Dacia has a habit of producing cars that are cheaper and also bigger than direct rivals. So while the Spring is cheaper than a Volkswagen e-Up to buy, you can expect it to have interior space to compete with cars from the class above – such as the Renault Zoe. 

As a result, it will accommodate four tall adults, have a boot big enough for at least one large suitcase and have plenty of smaller storage spaces sprinkled around the interior.  

What it won’t have is a particularly inspiring interior. Expect cheap plastics to everywhere, while the only hint that the Spring is indeed electric is the drive selector nestled between the front seats. Sadly, the flat floor and neat packaging that makes modern electric cars feel so airy inside, won’t be a Dacia Spring thing.

At least equipment levels will be relatively healthy with the Spring getting fundamentals like air-conditioning and a stereo as standard – the kind of kit you’d have paid extra for when the Dacia Sandero first went on sale in the UK.

 

Dacia Spring Electric performance and range

The Dacia Spring Electric is all about offering EV power at a knockdown price so powerful electric motors and monster batteries are not on the menu.

Instead, you get a 33kW motor which pumps out the equivalent of 44PS – or close to half the power you get from the Toyota Aygo X we drove earlier this month and found to be far from spritely. A top speed of 78mph means it will cruise on the motorway, but only just.

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High speeds are worth avoiding though because long cruises will rinse the Dacia Spring’s battery – it has a 140-mile range as a best-case scenario.  

Stick to the city, where the Dacia’s regenerative brakes get plenty of opportunity to replenish the battery, and that range should be easy to attain. Using a 30kW public charger, you should be able to replenish the battery from 0-80 per cent in just 1 hour. A full charge from flat will take 5 hours using a 7.4kWh wall charger at home or 14 hours using a three-prong plug.