Our opinion on the Dacia Spring
On first impression, the Dacia Spring makes a tempting case for itself, with its low price making it easier to overlook the flaws that often come with a car built down to a budget.
However, delve a little deeper, and those shortcomings, chiefly the poor refinement and budget tyre choice, could make or break the Spring as a viable ownership proposition. We’d happily overlook past Euro NCAP safety ratings, because attempting to meet the safety organisation’s high standards would make the Spring prohibitively expensive, while great efficiency, ease of use and manoeuvrability mean it’s the perfect choice as a second car, especially if you’re doing plenty of urban journeys.
About the Dacia Spring
The Spring is Dacia’s first fully electric car, and it’s also the smallest model the firm offers in the UK. Both of those things are likely to attract new buyers to the brand, and this is backed up by data from the continent. Dacia says that based on Spring sales in Europe, where the car was available in a pre-facelift guise, 79 per cent of buyers were new to the brand, and 93 per cent had never purchased an electric car before.
Given that it’s now the entry point to the company’s line-up, the Spring is quite intriguing. It was first introduced into Europe in 2021, but it can actually trace its origins back to China in 2019, where it’s manufactured and sold as the Renault City K-ZE, as well as under some other Chinese brands. The Renault City K-ZE is the electric version of the Renault Kwid, which is a budget petrol model in China.
There have been a host of changes to the K-ZE to transform it into the Dacia Spring, chief among them being the safety kit, such as including six airbags, more electronics and a reinforced chassis. A further update in 2026 also saw the Spring gain a new battery and some aerodynamic tweaks in order to boost efficiency. There’s even a van version available, the Dacia Spring Cargo, which is a two-seat delivery model that’s classified as a commercial vehicle.
In order to find if the Dacia Spring is the king of the (zero-emission) city, we lined it up against its most direct rival, the Leapmotor T03, in a twin test. While we can’t fault the Spring’s starting price as well as its efficiency, the T03 offers superior refinement and space for a very similar amount of money, so it claimed the victory.
Dacia Spring prices and latest deals
The Dacia Spring starts from around £16,000, which makes it one of the very cheapest full-size electric cars on sale in the UK, and it’ll only cost you another £1,000 to upgrade to the range-topping Extreme model. In other words, the entire line-up is very competitively priced.
