Dacia Sandero

A monochrome mithering of petrified nuns crammed under their chapel pews, fear-propelled rosary beads flailing like amphetamine-laden abaci in the sisters’ utter conviction that the Devil is on his way and world is about to end…

Not the first thing that springs to everybody’s mind at the mention of the word Dacia, but for me forever synonymous with my introductory encounter with the brand.

The summer of 1999 marked the most recent visit to European climes of a total solar eclipse. And whilst astronomer Patrick Moore sulked majestically on a soggy Cornish bench under the relentless grid-lock of stratocumulus skies, your roving correspondent found himself standing next to a priest (there to reassure all but the nuns that the Devil was not, in fact, inbound) under a clear blue firmament on a hilltop in the middle of Romania; the location calculated by NASA to provide the longest pan-European period of blackout – all 2 minutes and 23 seconds of it.

It was, frankly, astonishing. Weird, but astonishing. The air warped to a treacly, gloom-laden hue I’ve never experienced before and over the horizon, travelling at about 1600mph, sped an immense shadow. Darkness -just brighter than a moonlit night- arrived so suddenly I found myself listening for an audible thud.

At this point I’d hoped for a reverential human hush as cocks crowed, dogs howled and astonished wildlife tumbled from the trees. Fat chance. The hillside erupted in a cacophony of celebration and, um, applause, accompanied by the daft American winding of fist by ear that suggests the owner has a clockwork head. ‘YEAH. ECLIPSE… WHOOOHOOOO. WOW… ECLIPSE. YEAH’. Sigh… Give me a plague of locusts over American tourists any day. They may eat as much, but they’re mercifully mute.

There were only two family vehicle types on Romanian roads 21 years ago; the haywain and the Dacia 1300 – the former self-explanatory and the latter a CKD iteration of Renault’s pushmi-pullyu 12. It’s somewhat Groundhog Day disconcerting to drive on roads exclusively populated by just one make of machine; each one you overtake is replaced by an identical one -even down to the colour- blithering about in front of you. This elicits an uncomfortable feeling of never really making progress. Happily, the opposite can be said of Dacia today…

Most mainstream manufacturers who add a second automotive string to their bow tend to err towards posh; think Toyota with Lexus, and, if we must, Nissan with Infiniti. But since Dacia has been rattling around in Romania since 1966 with a pedigree that’s anything but, Renault has taken the sensible option of ruthlessly sticking with the budget schtick to accompany the brand’s migration into Western Europe.

Dacia launched in the UK in 2013, since when its Sandero has more or less continuously held sway over bragging rights as the cheapest car in Britain, the boast of ‘providing all the essentials’ through simplicity, spaciousness, robustness and furry slippers accompanying it to the launch pad.

Interestingly, however, though perhaps lured into the showroom by the promise of the cheapest new car smell in the UK, some 60% of the punters who have parted with their cash to date have wantonly smashed sufficient additional piggy bankery to afford the Stepway version because they fancied a further sprinkling of SUV trimmings on their basic Sandero salad.

And the song is set to remain very much the same for this spanking new specimen; the cheapest available variant, ‘Access’ grade, will be priced at just £7,995, yet Renault expects its admirable parsimony in this department to be rewarded by a whopping 0.8% of total Sandero sales. Indeed, it could be argued that this bottom rung of the model grade ladder exists solely to keep those all-important bragging rights intact.

The last time I drove a Dacia its boxy simplicity brought white goods instantly to mind; the affordable British fridge you buy with your fingers crossed because you can’t quite stretch to the chillingly efficient German triumvirate of Neff, Bosch and AEG, and you’re fundamentally disinterested in the style-sponsored price-hike monolith that is a SMEG.

Mercifully, though, that analogy will no longer fly, because this new Sandero, built on Renault’s CMF-B modular platform of new Clio fame, appears to have actually been both designed and engineered, rather than merely assembled…

Your take on the Dacia’s new, 11% more slippery couture will very much depend on your attitude towards Nissan’s Qashqai. If you consider the latter to be les genoux de l’abeille of contemporary family car styling then you’ll warm quite readily to the Sandero. If, on the other hand, you simply can’t understand why a car so astonishingly humdrum in every visual department sells in such enormous quantities, then you may require a whiff more persuasion.

This may well be forthcoming from the interior, of which -despite a major overhaul- we can still say, what a joy it is to unearth a predominantly analogue environment. So, simple Renault switchgear on and behind the helm, and on the door panels, three readily grabbable knobs with push-button centres for the air-conditioning, and large, clear analogue speedometer and rev counter dials with a central multi-information screen in the driver’s instrument binnacle. All a doddle to use on the move.

This is an £11,595 ‘Comfort’ grade car, so the digital world does inevitably invade in the shape of a jauntily angled 8-inch multimedia touch-screen atop the dash, which boasts DAB radio, navigation, and both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with wireless connectivity. And there’s also a built-in cradle plus USB port alongside for both securing and involving one’s mobile phone.

The interior’s build and trim quality is streets ahead of its predecessor, with a tactile, soft-touch fabric finish to the door armrests and the swathe of the dashboard you may occasionally fondle, and a far better quality of plastic moulding elsewhere.

New front seats secure even the more hastily constructed amongst us with adequate snuggicity. And the addition of reach adjustment to the helm makes for a substantially more off duty driving position to boot. This being the only Sandero in the country and left-hand drive, we’ll have to reserve judgement as to pedal positioning; stacks of room for an LHD clutch foot rest rarely translates to RHD guise, wherein the gap between clutch pedal and transmission tunnel is invariably closed to anything wider than a ballet pump.

An extra 42mm of legroom has somehow been shoehorned into the split/folding rear seat accommodation, creating claimed segment-best space and obviating the city car need for adult occupants to adopt the ten-to-two leg positioning favoured by male CAMRA members savouring a particularly hallowed ale.

A 328 litre loadspace capacity is also something of a surprise for those used to residual city car boots which will only accommodate a draught excluder at one specific angle.

In celebration, then, of a new -and at first glance rather wholesome- take on the cheapest car in Britain (and, frankly, because Covid restrictions won’t let me go anywhere else), we’re off around the county’s most well-heeled AONB (Area of Outstanding Numbers of Banknotes), the Cotswolds, on the shortest day of the year, for a bit of an old-money-meets-lack-of-new-money tour.

Being dominated by a building which blatantly monumentalises the first arrival of money to the region, Chipping Norton -ostensibly home to the mysterious, shadowy ‘set’- makes for a good starting point. Bliss Mill, topped by a chimney disguised as a classical column disguised as a loo plunger so vast that the RAF uses it as a visual waypoint, was built by one William Bliss in 1872 for the manufacture of tweed. The building tells us two things: firstly, shearing sheep can prove ludicrously lucrative; and, secondly, the Victorians were brilliant engineers but absolutely appalling architects.

Without managing to imbue it with any of the honey-hued elegance associated with many of the region’s towns and villages, let alone the remotest hint of quaint, time has passed by Chipping Norton. And so shall we…

Better by far to breakfast in eye-wateringly twee Bourton-on-the-Water, known as the Venice of the Cotswolds because a river runs through it, and because some 300,000 tourists a year climb off a coach, shed their socks and Nazareth knockabouts, roll up their trousers and paddle about in same. Bourton’s got the lot; more tea shops than you can shake a stick at, obese ducks cruising at periscope depth, a model village, the self-explanatory Birdland, and even the Cotswold Motoring Museum where you may gaze, spellbound at the actually Brum from the eponymous 90s TV series. It would probably sell sticks of rock but for the danger of the name overlapping itself round the outside…

On rare, flood-free days, making decent progress driving in the Cotswolds can be a challenge. In summer, the roads are glutted by caravans, motorhomes, coaches making for Bourton and the elderly making for whatever they can see over the top of the wheel. For the rest of the year, snow, ice, slush and mud -the latter deposited by F Giles, who can never be arsed to tidy up after himself- hold sway.

Lob into the equation the fact that it’s almost impossible to find a stretch of tarmac that runs in a straight line for more than 100 yards at a time and the wisdom of spending 10 times the cost of a Sandero on a vast SUV which comes over all broaching racing yacht at the first sniff of a corner becomes somewhat questionable.

Truth is, though the Sandero won’t let you look over hedges, tease people and shave your legs in quite the same imperious fashion as a Range Rover facilitates, the 90bhp of the former’s three-cylinder turbocharged 1 .0 litre petrol engine is more than enough to biff only a little over a tonne of tin about with pleasing alacrity.

Though it may dawdle a tad in its efforts to exceed the motorway speed limit, the Dacia steps smartly away from a standstill and remains admirably sprightly until you near law-breaking velocity – its gruff three-pot burble overlaid by the distant turbocharged tune of a diminutive executive jet taxiing happily about under the bonnet.

Nor is the Sandero unamusing to helm. The steering delivers unexpected degrees of accuracy and feel, its Clio underpinnings keep an impressively tight rein on understeer, and the six-speed stick is flickable enough to ensure that keeping the baby Lear jet busy under the bonnet is no chore. Indeed, scrabbling up the sinuous Fish Hill on the way back from picturesque Broadway, the Dacia showed a decidedly clean pair of heels to the photographer’s Passat estate. Nuff said…

All of which entertainment delivers us in no time to Kingham, dubbed ‘England’s Favourite Village’ by Country Life magazine in 2006, despite the fact it doesn’t even have a duck pond. This courtesy of a panel of ladies-who-lunch in London all week and then don the Cath Kidtson wellies for a weekend away victualled exclusively by the Daylesford Organic Farm shop, which is -not uncoincidentally- just down the road from the beknighted burg.

Daylesford is proof, if proof were needed, that if you paint it the right colour, double the prices and stick an ‘Organic’ label on absolutely everything including the left buttock of every staff member, people will come. Especially the bell-ends who’ve booked a weekend bell tent at nearby Soho House. Boasting an environment best described as a million pounds spent at Woolworths, Soho House membership used to be reserved for the creative types who couldn’t afford it. Now they’ll let any old Tom, Dick and Harriet in to hang out in a gloomy bar desperately hoping to be recognised by each other.

Against a backdrop of such bizarre Cotswold social mores, the Dacia seems even more sensible a proposition. It’s alarmingly competent for something that, even in this top Comfort specification, is six grand less than the cheapest five-door Fiesta. And why you’d ever look at a £12,000 city car when the Sandero exists is beyond me.

Which Model and Why

We’re driving the Comfort TCe 90 here, but if you want to save yourself £1500 and pay under 10 grand for a car, the Essential grade fitted with the same powerplant fits the bill. You’ll lose a few non-essential toys and, most significantly, the multimedia system, but the smartphone cradle and ready connectivity mean you can use the Dacia app to access navigation, music and the all the other stuff you probably already use.

Not So Good Stuff

The electric handbrake is a mule-recalcitrant pain in the arse. It takes an age to release, and you can’t simply drive through it to set off. The loadspace lip is set so high that owners will have to work awhile on their Clean and Jerk technique to clear it tidily with a supine mother-in-law. And the relentless dual-tone, fore and aft tom-tom bonging of the parking sensors makes Raw Sex sound Like Santana.

Breakfast Time was when every road tester’s long day’s journey into night began with the essential Olympic breakfast in Little Chef. Today, however, it’s a toss-up between the Sausage and Egg McMuffin -invariably ruined by a burned bun and an egg with the texture of a yoga mat, or the Gregg’s sausage roll – chemically enhanced like Smarties to ensure that one just isn’t enough. Then again, there is a fine bakery in Bourton-on-the-Water…