In our previous report, the toilet habits of wild birds were mentioned. Back in April, some sort of turf war was going on between some very territorial blackbirds and every other flying beast that was attempting to share our back garden parking area. The Spring’s door mirrors were being used by the blackbirds as lookout posts and bomb-test platforms. God knows what they’d been eating but it has proved difficult to clean the results off the Dacia’s paintwork, and very difficult indeed to get it off the black plastic trim sheets that adorn the lower door sections.
These are budget vehicles and it would be unfair to expect Bentley standards of finish on something so cheap. The paint is as basic as the rest of the car. It’s just something to bear in mind if you live in a birdy area and aren’t able to keep your Spring under cover. Like everything else about this little Dacia, none of this should be a concern as long as your expectations are pitched at the right level. We’ve relaxed into it now, not worrying about the general grime it’s accumulated and banking on Dacia’s press car preparation folk to have the right Cilit Bang-type poop-removal potions on hand when they take the car back from us later this summer.
That’s if we don’t buy the Spring off them. We can almost see that happening as the car is endearing, nippy and functional. Our four-year-old granddaughter Hannah would certainly approve. After having a go at steering ours from her granny’s lap (on private roads, hrrumph) she drew a big heart in the car’s log and added a note to say that she liked it.
More importantly for skinflints like me Springs are downright cheap, especially secondhand. Some of the posters responding to the first report hurried themselves off to look at the classified ads to see how much Springs were going for. The answer to that was, as Paul Daniels used to say, ‘not a lot’. We weren’t going to mention it in the first write-up but now that you lot have we feel we can.
The new price of our range-topping Extreme 65 was £16,995, the basic Expression 45 at the other end of the short scale being £14,995 and the gap-plugging Expression 65 at £15,995. At the time of writingyou’d have no trouble finding delivery-mileage 45 Springs at Vertu Renault outlets (that are also Dacia dealerships) for £10,495, along with plenty of 65 Extreme demonstrators for under £11k. Clearly Dacia UK has been given some loss-leading leeway to get these cars out onto British roads.
At this sort of money, you’d need to be very anti-EV indeed to disqualify them from any second car short list you might have. The pleasure of not having to fork out hard cash at the petrol station certainly shows no sign of wearing off. On the forum for the first report PH poster Martin12345 reckoned home charging costs 5p per kilowatt hour. We’re not brainy enough to work that sort of stuff out but we do know it’s a hell of a lot less than the £50-£70 that we typically pour down our ICE cars’ greedy gullets on a far too frequent basis.
Time, like the Spring, is short and somehow we’ve got to the end of another report without getting into any detail on range. Gah. Just for now we’ll tell you that the car is currently claiming a 100 per cent-charged range of 130 miles, which represents a small but useful creep up from the 122 miles it was showing when we first got it in the coolness of February.
There’s always a discrepancy between claimed and actual mileages in EVs, and that’s true of the Spring. Picking one example out of the log book, when we drove an actual 71 miles that reduced the claimed remaining mileage by 85. You could probably reduce that discrepancy by making more use of the B regen mode and driving more circumspectly than we’ve been doing, but where’s the fun in that?
Car: 2025 Dacia Spring Extreme Electric 65
Price as tested: £16,995
Run by: Tony M
On fleet since: February 2025
Mileage: 4,900
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