Dacia Spring review

When you’re working at the office or away from home, one of the most important questions of the day is: "What’s for lunch?" Sure, you could treat yourself to a takeaway, but a supermarket meal deal contains all the key components for a lot less money. The Dacia Spring electric car is, in effect, the meal deal – giving you the essentials for a price that massively undercuts all rivals.

Indeed, the Spring is cheaper than our favourite small electric model, the MG4 EV, as well as the Citroën ë-C3, the Fiat 500e and the Hyundai Inster, making it the cheapest new electric car you can buy. Even the very competitively priced (and tiny) Leapmotor T03 costs more.

Sounds tempting. But to keep the price low, the ingredients that have gone into the Spring are more Iceland than Waitrose. We’re talking about a car with just four seats, steel (rather than alloy) wheels, a tiny 26.8kWh battery, an official range of just 140 miles, a motor with a maximum power output of 64bhp and a maximum charging rate of 30kW.

Dacia Spring video review

After being on sale in Europe for a few years, the Spring is finally available in the UK in an updated form. It looks, on paper at least, like something of a halfway house between a quadricycle like a Citroën Ami and a full-sized electric car like the ë-C3. And perhaps that's no bad thing.

Dacia says its customers travel an average of 23 miles a day at an average speed of 23mph, and for those people the Spring’s projected range and performance is plenty. Plus, an earlier version sold like hot cakes in Europe. Read on to find out if the Dacia Spring satisfies our appetite at a bargain price...

All versions of the Dacia Spring get a small 26.8kWh battery, but you do get to choose between two motor power outputs: 44bhp (Electric 45) or 64bhp (Electric 65).

We’ve yet to sample the less-powerful car, but its official 0-62mph time of 19.1 seconds looks positively glacial. Unless you live in the centre of a city where you’re unlikely to venture above 30mph, we’d favour the Electric 65. While the more powerful car’s official 0-62mph time of 14 seconds doesn’t sound particularly quick (a Citroën ë-C3 is nearly four seconds quicker to 62mph), it feels punchier than you’d expect.

From 0-40mph, it piles on speed with genuine enthusiasm, before tailing off quite noticeably as you close in on the national speed limit. Not that you’d ever want to drive the Spring in a particularly spirited manner – the steering is both slow and devoid of feel.

The steering isn’t a problem in city centres, where its lightness makes navigating tight streets relatively easy, but it’s incredibly difficult to place the car with any real accuracy at higher speeds on a country road. There's also considerable body lean, lots of forward pitching under braking and a low level of grip. As a result, the Spring robs its driver of confidence and risks motion sickness in passengers.

It’s a similar story when it comes to ride comfort. Around town, the suspension does a good job of soaking up impacts from potholes and raised ironwork. However, when you build up speed, it grows choppy and begins to pogo its way down the road.

The Leapmotor T03 is more comfortable at higher speeds, and the Citroën ë-C3 and Hyundai Inster are better choices if you plan to do a lot of longer journeys.

It doesn’t help that the Spring is noisier than rival electric cars at around 50mph and faster, with lots of wind and road noise. Long trips are likely to be tiring for all on board, so perhaps it’s not a bad thing that you’ll be forced to stop regularly to recharge the tiny battery.

The 140-mile official range is rather underwhelming, and around 50 miles less than you officially get from the cheapest Citroën ë-C3 or at least 75 less than a Peugeot e-208. As our real range tests have shown, you're unlikely to get even that far.

“The Dacia Spring’s Eco drive mode gives you a more relaxed accelerator response but I found it’s best reserved for cruising. If you try to accelerate towards motorway speeds, it takes a long, long time.” – Neil Winn, Deputy Reviews Editor

Considering the Spring's low price, Dacia’s designers deserve praise for creating an interior that looks modern and in keeping with the rest of the Dacia car line-up. With attractive details such as a hexagonal steering wheel, Y-shaped air vents and, on top-spec Extreme models, flashes of bronze trim, the Spring certainly looks less austere inside than an MG4 EV.

Once you start to inspect it, it's impossible to ignore that nearly all the interior plastics are hard and scratchy. To an extent, that's also the case in the Citroën ë-C3 and Leapmotor T03 but they at least benefit from a variety of surface textures, with the ë-C3 getting a dashboard covered in recycled fabric.

On a more positive note, the Spring’s interior design makes good sense in city traffic. The driver’s seat is set relatively high, giving you a slightly elevated view at junctions that’s helped by relatively tall windows and narrow pillars. We love, too, that most functions – including adjusting the temperature and turning off the safety assist functions – can be operated using physical buttons.

Finding a comfortable driving position can be tricky, because the steering wheel only adjusts for height, so longer-legged drivers might have to sit uncomfortably close to the pedals to reach the wheel. And while over-the-shoulder visibility is better than in some rival electric cars, the rear-view camera is low-resolution, while the parking sensors are a bit hyperactive. You get rear sensors on entry-level Expression trim, while Extreme trim adds front sensors.

Infotainment-wise, Expression cars come with a dashboard clip for mounting your smartphone while Extreme models get a perfectly adequate 10.0in infotainment touchscreen. The screen is mounted high up on the dashboard so it’s easy to read, the lay-out is pretty intuitive and the main icons are fairly big and easy to aim for.

The Spring in Expression trim also comes with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which is a good thing, because the Dacia sat-nav app is woefully slow in use. The standard two-speaker stereo struggles to drown out road noise, which is a shame.

“I like the look of the stubby gear lever but there’s a pause between me selecting a gear and it actually engaging, which makes manoeuvres a slightly clunky process.” – Lawrence Cheung, New Cars Editor

The small size of the Dacia Spring means front-seat occupants will need to get used to occasionally brushing legs with each other. There’s also very little elbow room, and it’s a shame there’s no central armrest. There is, however, lots of storage space. The glovebox is sizeable, there’s an extra large cubby carved into the dashboard and the door bins are very generous.

There's 33 litres of storage available in total, and if you want a touch more practicality, you can specify Dacia’s YouClip system. That gives you two anchor points on the centre console and one on the dashboard, allowing you to attach useful items, such as a smartphone holder, a torch, a cupholder or a bag hook.

The Spring’s rear doors make it easier to access the back seats than it would be to climb into the back of a three-door Fiat 500e or Mini Cooper Electric. However, once you get seated you’ll find that there's very little leg room, even for a passenger of average height.

Head room is adequate if you’re under six feet tall, but because the roof curves down quite low to the side of the car it blocks your view out and feels claustrophobic. And don’t even think about carrying a fourth passenger – because you can’t. Unlike in a Citroën ë-C3 or MG4 EV there's no middle seat or centre seatbelt.

The Spring's boot size is a bit more impressive at 308 litres. That means it’s bigger than those of the Leapmotor T03, the Mini Cooper Electric and the Ora 03, and on par with the ë-C3. It gives you enough space to fit a week’s worth of shopping, but the boot opening is quite small and it has a high load lip, which makes loading in heavy items a bit of a chore.

The rear seats fold down in one piece, leaving a step up from the recessed boot floor (rather than creating a long, flat load area).

There’s no hidden cable storage compartment under the boot floor. However, Dacia has at least come up with a solution. If you’re willing to pay a bit extra, you can have a charging cable holder under the front bonnet. It’s basic – and doesn't have a cover like the one on the Alfa Romeo Junior – but it does the job.

“The Dacia Spring isn't the most spacious small car, but at 5ft 11in, I’d be fine for a short journey to the shops.” – Lawrence Cheung, New Cars Editor

If we disqualify quadricycles like the Citroën Ami, you won’t find a new electric car that undercuts the starting price of the Dacia Spring. The Leapmotor T03 is the closest, costing slightly more, but even the range-topping Spring comes in significantly cheaper than an entry-level BYD Dolphin, Citroën ë-C3, MG4 EV, Mini Cooper Electric or Ora 03.

Two trim levels are offered for the Spring: Expression and Extreme. Expression gets the bare essentials, such as cruise control, air conditioning, steering wheel-mounted controls, electric front windows and rear parking sensors.

We think Extreme trim is worth the extra cost. It’s available only in conjunction with the more powerful Electric 65 version, and has some really useful additions. They include electrically adjustable mirrors, front parking sensors, electric rear windows, vehicle-to-load (V2L) charging and a 10.0in infotainment touchscreen.

As well as being cheap, the Spring is also the lightest electric car currently on sale in the UK, and during our testing that helped eke out the range from the battery pleasingly efficiently. We returned 4.3 miles per kWh, giving it a rough real-world range of 115 miles. That's g0od to know if you can't charge up at home and will be paying the higher kWh prices of public EV chargers.

What if you want to venture out on a long-distance road trip in a Dacia Spring? Well, our advice would be to take another car.

While its small battery should, in theory, be quick to charge, the 26.8kWh unit in the Spring is restricted by a 30kW maximum charging rate – and that’s only available on the more powerful version. That’s slower than all of its closest rivals and means the Spring takes around 45 minutes to charge from 20-80% – 20 minutes longer than the ë-C3.

If you charge at home using a three-pin plug, you’ll get a 20-100% charge in around 11 hours, and it’ll take four hours for the same charge if you have a 7kW home wallbox charger.

The latest Spring has not been tested for safety by Euro NCAP and therefore it inherits the one-star safety rating of the pre-facelift model (which wasn't sold in the UK). This reluctance to re-test the car indicates to us that Dacia isn’t confident in how well the Spring physically protects passengers, given that this latest version packs lane-keeping assistance, speed-limit recognition, a driver attention alert system and automatic emergency braking (AEB).

The Spring did not feature in our 2024 What Car? Reliability Survey but Dacia as a brand performed very well, finishing in sixth place out of 31 manufacturers. Dacia gives you a standard three-year, 60,000-mile warranty on the car, while its main battery is covered for eight years and 75,000 miles.

“I like that you get copper-coloured exterior highlights on top-spec Extreme trim to help mark it out from other Springs.” – Dan Jones, Senior Reviewer

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