Dacia Spring | PH Fleet
Tony has already done over 2,000 miles in the Spring. Thank goodness for his extension cord...
Right, it’s time for part two of our running report on the Dacia Spring Extreme 65, still the cheapest and, at 951kg, the lightest electric vehicle on the UK market. Despite using it exclusively for darting between Powys townships, and despite owning three other cars, in three months we’ve managed to rack up well over 2,000 miles in our Spring. Charging exclusively at home via a domestic 3-pin plug has been easy and issue-free, now that we’ve worked out that we can’t just yank the charging plug out of the socket without first unlocking the car. We also learned that we had to unroll all the cable off our common-or-garden extension reel to avoid hotspot-generated tripouts.
Some of you might sneer at the use of the word ‘power’ in any review of a 65hp car that takes the best part of 14 seconds to hit 62mph from rest, but the rate at which the Spring covers the ground between 0 and 50mph remains just as gigglesome now halfway through our time with the car as it did at the beginning. One poster on the first report (Lil Red GTO) said that driving his wife’s Spring was hilarious, like driving a base model Peugeot 205 or a Citroën AX with a supercharger. We wouldn’t disagree with that.
Not that we’ll be doing it, but it would be interesting to put a 205 through one of the rural runs we use and see how it compares time-wise with the Dacia. I’m guessing there wouldn’t be much in it, even if you had something a little gruntier than a base 205. The Peugeot would probably be quicker in a bend, but maybe not by as much as you might think. I am also fairly sure that when powering out of that bend and squirting up to the next one, the Spring would leave it for dead. You’re just never in the wrong gear in an EV.
The Spring’s high ground clearance did come in for a bit of criticism from some posters, but we like the look of it and we also like the reassurance it provides on the medieval tracks that Powys likes to call roads. We’ve been living here for five years and have so far had to have at least half a dozen suspension arms replaced or repaired on our various cars. I can’t be sure of the exact number; I’ve actually lost count. All I’ll say is that I’m writing this having literally just come back from the latest ‘welderup!’ job, this time on our otherwise faithful old Merc wagon. You can clearly hear the Dacia’s suspension working hard on the worst roads, but so far none of it has broken.
The maximum payload for the 65 is 341kg, and it’s 10kg less than that for the 45, which means that with four standard to large Western adults on board, you’re not going to have much opportunity for luggage. None of that is an issue for us as the kids are long gone. We folded the back seats down on day one to use the car as a sort of minivan, and we haven’t seen the seats since. Actually, that’s not quite true: we did get them out when we stopped to give a paraglider a lift. They were folded back immediately after. We asked Glider Guy for a comment on life in the back. He replied by saying it was a bit tight in there, which was understandable when you saw how much legroom he had with two adults in the front. I’ve sat in the back myself with the front seat pushed forward. In that configuration, the space both front and rear is perfectly acceptable for short trips, which are basically the only ones you’ll be doing in a Spring.
Talking of civilisation, it’s time to cue up some Laurel & Hardy music. For one thing, the speakers have sometimes emitted a loud and rather scary squawk when you’re approaching the car after unlocking it. It’s the sort of noise more mature readers will remember their '60s mains radios making when you turned them on. For another, out where we are, digital signals are rarely found and even FM can be elusive, so with the rural user in mind, it might have been nice to give Spring owners the option of access to medium wave on the radio. Obviously, that isn’t going to happen, but you can still buy MW/FM portable radios for less than twenty quid. My partner, Krys, used to drive her old Mk1 Mini around with a battery-powered radio cassette booming away on the back seat, so maybe that’s the answer for us.
We’ve found the central infotainment screen that’s included on the Extreme models to be a bit of a weak spot in the car. Some of that is down to ignorance. There’s no explanation of it in the only (and at 26 pages, appropriately lightweight) Practical Guide that comes with the car. The full User Guide is a 268-page PDF that has to be downloaded and, if you’re old like us and need something ‘real’ in your hand, printed off. We haven’t done that as we can’t afford the ink. We’ve struggled to understand the blizzard of random colours, squiggles, and icons on the driver’s display for pretty much the same reason. Again, we feel this might be a common problem for older owners.
When the infotainment screen is working (it has blacked out quite a few times) and not trying to aggressively take over your phone’s Bluetooth, you’ll need the digital dexterity of darts prodigy Luke Littler to select things on it while bouncing along the highway, or low-way as we call them around here. There have been a number of low tyre pressure warnings. After paying attention to the first couple and finding them to be false alarms, we’ve been ignoring them. I guess there isn’t a vast volume of air in those tiny tyres, so an equally tiny drop in pressure might probably trigger the TPMS, but it did become a touch annoying after a dozen or so requests for us to get out and do something about it. Life’s too short.
Car: 2025 Dacia Spring Extreme Electric 65
Price as tested: £16,995
Run by: Tony M
On fleet since: February 2025
Mileage: 3,300
It's not as if I was expecting it to feel "premium" either. - I'm used to and totally "get" cheap, basic cars and am not the sort to turn my nose up at something that doesn't have a certain badge / image or spec. I'd happily have put up with halogen lights, steel wheels and no air con, touchscreen or steering wheel buttons for a bit better build quality. We were also driven in a base model Sandero and that seemed much better resolved, although again relatively highly specced for a base model.
If they're not careful, all legislatiors will do is force people into older but bigger, heavier (and more dangerous in urban environments) cars!
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