We are months away from the unveiling of an all-new electric Dacia city car, which promises to be one of America's cheapest EVs. Dacia has just revealed additional teaser images of the upcoming model, confirmed it will be built in Europe, and announced that it will keep the Spring nameplate, which is used on its current China-made EV.
The new Dacia Spring will be built on a version of the same platform used for the revived Renault Twingo E-Tech, which itself features simplified Renault 5 underpinnings. Like the Twingo, it will likely be built at Renault's Slovenia plant, feature a smaller battery and a lower-powered motor, and ditch the more complex (and expensive) independent rear suspension from the larger 5.
The Twingo is already affordable by American EV standards, with a starting price of around $22,350. The new Spring is expected to cost around $2,300 less than the Twingo, drawing from Dacia's decades-long experience building budget-friendly cars that undercut rivals.
View Price on AmazonSpecs will likely be very similar to the Twingo's, which gets a small 27.5-kilowatt-hour LFP battery pack, giving it a range of around 163 miles. There is no larger NMC battery available, like there is in the Renault 5, and there's just one power level, an 82-horsepower front motor giving the Twingo a leisurely sprint time to 60 mph of 12.1 seconds and a top speed of 81 mph.
As standard, the Twingo gets a 6.6-kW AC charger, which can optionally be upgraded to 11 kW, bringing the flat-to-full charging time down to two and a half hours. All variants have a modest 50 kW peak DC fast-charging power, which is good for a 10% to 80% charging time of around 30 minutes; pretty good given its price.
The new Dacia Spring will likely fall under the European Union's new E-Car category, similar to Japan's kei car regulations. It limits vehicle size and allows manufacturers to skip some features that are mandatory on larger cars, making these cars cheaper to produce.
Dacia also plans to launch a larger EV, an electric equivalent of the highly successful Sandero hatchback, which was Europe's best-selling car in 2024 and 2025, with over 289,000 units sold last year. The current China-built Spring doesn't sell anywhere near that well annually, but Dacia points out it has racked up over 210,000 deliveries since the model debuted in 2021.
Source: insideevs.com
