Dacia Spring | PH Fleet

There's never been an EV shed of the week. But now Shed is driving a shiny new EV - what could possibly go wrong?

So, on a website whose founding motto was ‘speed matters’, here we are driving a car where speed – or top speed at least – would appear to play little part in the proceedings.

The Dacia Spring that we’ll be running for a few months still feels important though. At its launch in mid-2024, it was the UK’s most affordable new electric car. As far as I’m aware, it still is in May 2025, when £14,995 would put you into the lower-powered 33kW/45hp car in Expression spec, which comes with no central 10-inch infotainment screen. The list price for our top-of-the-range Extreme 65 with the screen and the 48kW/65hp motor is £16,995. Between those two, you have the mid-tier Expression 65 option at £16k. These prices include a 3-year/60,000-mile warranty (extendable to seven years if you stay inside the Dacia servicing network) plus an 8-year/75,000-mile warranty on the main traction battery. Demonstrator cars can be found for considerably smaller sums too.

As EV virgins living in the stickiest of Welsh sticks, my partner and I wanted to find out how practical electricity might be as a power source for a car, how realistic it would be to run one without using fast charging units, and how much fun it might be to drive. Going into it, we were quite hopeful. We’d read that the average daily journey length by UK motorists was about four miles. OK, maybe a bit more than that, but not by much. Dacia says that the average daily Spring trip is 23 miles at an average speed of 25mph, with 75 per cent of cars being recharged at home.

The Spring has a 26.8kWh battery, which doesn’t sound a lot, but Dacia says that its motor is very efficient, using fewer than 14.6 kW hours of electricity every 62 miles. We’ll talk more about the range we’ve actually been getting in the next exciting instalment, but in the couple of months that we’ve had the Spring, we’ve done around 1,500 miles in it without going anywhere near a fast charger. Almost literally so, actually, as public chargers are very thin on the ground in this part of Powys. There is one about 12 miles away, but to build up our BEV range-bravery reserves in this early part of the adventure, we’ve restricted ourselves to local jaunts, so there’s been no need to use anything more technical than the 3-pin plughole outside our house.

Not only is the Spring the cheapest EV, it’s also the lightest one – and that, believe it or not, brings the unlikely-sounding prospect of speed into the equation. The 65’s eagerness to squirt or indeed spring forwards has so far never failed to bring a smile to our faces. The headline 0-62mph figure of 13.7 seconds for the 65 might sound lame - and the 19.1 seconds sounds positively arthritic - but those numbers don’t reflect the step-off surge that is every EV’s party trick and that will get you off the line at the lights quicker than anything else (apart from another EV, of course).

You do need to be a bit careful springing backwards as it does that with the same sort of perkiness it exhibits in forwards mode, which is not necessarily what you want when you’re trying to get out of a tight street parking space. Covering the brake with your foot is definitely a good idea in these situations.

I haven’t driven the lower-powered Spring. The weight saving over the 65 is only 8kg but I’d be surprised if it didn’t offer a very decent balance of power and handling for the sort of roads we frequent. Matching any car’s weight to its springing and damping is never easy, and when you’re trying to keep your manufacturing costs down to the bare minimum, you’re hardly going to be specifying premium suspension components. Any car’s shortcomings will be quickly exposed on the Wild West roads of Powys, and sure enough, the Spring’s springs, or more precisely its dampers, can’t respond quickly enough to transverse ridges, from which the car will be launched clear of the road, or to sharp-edged, dog-swallowing potholes that are popular round here, where there will be a noticeable drop.

Having said that, the ride quality is actually more than adequate on the few semi-decent roads inhabited by local councillors. There is some road roar through the thin bodywork, but maybe not as much as you might expect because you’re not making contact with all that much road on those titchy 165/65 15-inch Linglong tyres. Budget replacements start from under £35 a corner from firms like Blackcircles, which seems suitably affordable, although you can pay the same outfit nearly £95 for a Conti AllSeason Contact. You’d have to be a bit mad to do that though.

Why is he yakking on about replacement tyres, you may be wondering? After all, with under 3,000 miles on our long-termer, there are no signs of wear on the OE hoops, and nor do I suppose this will be an issue by the time we give the car back later this summer, but it would be interesting to see the wear rates front to rear on an enthusiastically driven 65. The novelty of instant power certainly hasn’t worn off for us yet. So far, we’ve not felt the need for any more poking around these parts. Sometimes you can catch yourself going maybe a little bit too quickly in the 65. On such narrow rubber, the sensation of an impending slide, usually initiated by a bump on a corner, is your clue that you’re approaching the natural limits of understeer. For the same kind of reason, the Spring’s seats are well padded, but they’re padded for comfort rather than support around corners because you’ll run out of grip before you run out of seat support.

It’s a shame Dacia had to electrify the steering in order to support today’s safety aids (here including lane-keeping assistance and quite a few other GSR2-standard features) since there is obviously no physical need for power steering in a car as light as this, and it would have been nostalgic to get a taste of the good/bad old days of unassisted helmage. Anyway, variable assistance steering is there, so let’s not complain about it. The upside is laughably easy manoeuvring in towns boosted by a beachball turning circle of well under 10 metres.

Tune in for the next exciting instalment when we will be talking about charging, range, some odd noises, and the toilet habits of blackbirds.

Car: 2025 Dacia Spring Extreme Electric 65
Price as tested: £16,995
Run by: Tony M
On fleet since: February 2025
Mileage: 2,700