JOYS OF SPRING(some text hidden)

By Jonathan Crouch

Ten Second Review word count: 59

Dacia shook up the affordable end of the EV market with this car, the Spring, but it needed more power to be really credible. It now has that in this revised form. The driving range is still very modest, but then so also is the price. And this Romanian contender remains fun to look at - and to drive.

Background word count: 195

Electric cars are too expensive. That's the bottom line. Despite continued industry promises, we're still waiting for the required wave of small, affordable EVs priced more comparably with fossil-fuelled runabouts. If any car maker was going to provide such a thing, you'd hope it might be Dacia, Renault's Romanian budget brand, who shook up the market a decade ago by offering UK folk a new family hatchback (the Sandero) for under £6,000. In 2021, they shook up the EV market too by launching what back then was Europe's cheapest electric car, the Spring. That original Spring model had a few rough edges, so Dacia waited until the 2024 mid-term update to launch it here in the UK. By June 2025, over 179,000 Springs had been sold in Europe, making this model No2 in its segment. But by this time, the car was starting to face tough competition from a similarly-priced but more powerful Chinese competitor, the Leapmotor T03. To bring the Spring back into proper contention, in Autumn 2025, Dacia launched a revised powertrain for this car, with a new LFP battery and much more power motor options. That's the car we look at here.