Dacia, the Romanian automaker owned by Renault, intends to keep offering internal combustion-engined vehicles even after the year 2030 and keep selling them until it becomes illegal to sell ICE in Europe. The European Union has banned the sale of thermal-engined vehicles on the continent after 2035, though, and Dacia does need to make an effort to move towards electrification by that time in order to stay on the market.
Automotive News Europe quotes Dacia CEO Denis Le Vot as saying
Renault will push to be the champion of electric engines; this has a risk. This is also why Dacia exists. Depending on how fast the market converts to electric engines and of clients' appetite, Dacia is here. The two can co-exist.
Dacia currently only sells one electric model, the Spring, which it doesn’t even manufacture itself, having outsourced the task to Dongfeng, in China. The Spring has been relatively successful in Europe, with 20,000 units sold in the first half of 2022, around 12 percent of Dacia’s total H1 sales.
Pure electric Dacia models are coming, though, with the next one being a subcompact EV expected to arrive sometime in 2024. The Spring will also be phased out in 2024, but Dacia has not confirmed the new model is actually a direct replacement - it will most likely be a larger vehicle, more like an electric Sandero.
It recently introduced the Jogger, a tall seven-seater wagon, which next year will gain a new hybrid version that borrows the E-Tech Hybrid technology from parent company Renault.
We also got a glimpse at the brand’s future design direction (albeit a very bold take on it) with the sun-loving Dacia Manifesto revealed a few days ago in Paris. It is an electric off-road buggy study that doesn’t preview any production model, but as always, these concepts do reveal some of an upcoming model’s character - for instance we can see how Dacia may choose to design the full-width front light bar, integrate it with its new logo and how this could be integrated with the headlight clusters.
