When the new car market started to sway towards electric power, many of us hoped that small, affordable cars would lead the charge. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that with the exception of one or two credible but expensive city cars, what we mainly got was a glut of large, heavy SUVs that make little to no sense in urban areas.
After a couple of false starts in the small-car segment, the choice is now rapidly expanding; the vehicles’ sizes are coming down, but more importantly, so are the prices. The two cars you see here are perfect examples of that: a pair of small electric cars that cost less than almost any petrol-powered alternatives in the class.
The Dacia Spring is hugely popular in mainland Europe already, with thousands of them zipping around continental city streets. But it’s only now, following a cosmetic and mechanical overhaul, that it’s available to British buyers, so was it worth the wait?
We’re testing it against the dinky T03 from a brand unfamiliar to most people in the UK, Leapmotor. We want to find out if it’s possible for a new car to simply be too cheap. And do these two rivals demand any compromises that will be too much to bear in everyday use?
Dacia Spring
| Model: | Dacia Spring Extreme |
| Price: | £16,995 |
| Powertrain: | 26.8Wh battery, 1x electric motor, 64bhp |
| 0-62mph: | 13.7 seconds |
| Test efficiency: | 5.0 miles/kWh |
| Official range: | 135 miles |
| Annual VED: | £195 |
The Dacia Spring is the Romanian brand’s first fully electric car, and it’s also the smallest model the firm has offered 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.
