The Dacia brand has recently introduced the cheapest electric vehicle on our market, which is an unconventional utility vehicle – Dacia Spring Cargo. The Romanian brand has done exactly what the EU’s proactively green market has been craving for – it has taken a cheap Chinese electric car, modified it to meet European standards and taken it into battle for corporate customers. But with its “low” price, is the Spring Cargo also a practical, versatile and safe car! What can you expect from this small utility vehicle! Let’s take a look…
First things first, the Dacia Spring Cargo is an all-electric vehicle, tailored primarily for city driving. The range of the electric car with a full battery is about 230 km in city mode. The car has two seats in the front, which are protected and separated from the cargo area by a solid steel grille. The Spring Cargo is thus, for example, absolutely ideal for the delivery services of various pizzerias or other fast delivery services in cities.
If we look at the car from the outside, I think Dacia has managed a very nice and modern refresh, along the lines of the brand’s current model range. So the front fascia boasts a new Dacia logo and it’s dominated by a very nice LED daytime running light. There’s only one wiper on the windscreen, which would be quite sufficient thanks to the small size of the windscreen, but strangely it only wipes a small area and leaves a strip of about 10 centimetres in the left part. The charging socket is still behind the carmaker’s logo, but the cover now flips to the side rather than up as it did on the personal version of the Sprint.
From the side, we can see a slight fender flare on the front and rear of the car to protect it from any scratches from city traffic. The rear of the vehicle is dominated by the large Dacia lettering and especially the rear lights, with again nice graphics. From the outside, you can safely distinguish the Cargo version from the classic Sprint by the absence of fake roof rails and side protection stickers. Then we see the 14″ steel wheels in the wheel arches, which are given a more interesting look by the very sophisticated plastic covers.
So let’s recap what has been improved over the Chinese version. The Spring, for example, has dual-circuit brakes with ABS in line with European legislation, seatbelts with pretensioners, one pair of airbags and some of those reinforcements to ensure that the bonnet doesn’t go out the windscreen towards the passengers on impact.
However, don’t expect any modern assistance systems like automatic steering, radar, or lidar here. Exceptions are the e-call system, which allows you to call for help in the event of an accident, and an adjustable speed limiter or optional rear camera. One star in the EuroNCAP rating is, after all, quite telling proof that only the imaginary necessary minimum has been added in terms of safety.
There’s nothing overly comfortable here, either. For example, the mirrors here adjust nicely with sticks, like they used to on old Skodas, and the windows may be electric, but you can’t roll down the rear ones from the front. The plastics are all over the place, they’re unsoftened and here and there they have scuffs from moulding. The sheetmetal is thin, the soundproofing in the door panels seems to be completely absent, and you won’t even find any plastic covers in the wheel arches. The radio blares through two cheap speakers and the LEDs here are only used for the aforementioned daytime running lights, the rest of the headlights glow with halogen bulbs that illuminate utterly miserably. In the city, however, this seems to get lost in the street lighting, so I don’t take it as a fault.
And I have to conclude, after a week of using it for city hopping, that I actually don’t mind any of the above at all. If Spring Cargo is really taken as a shifter for short rides around the house, it handles those more than well. Agility is comparable to any basic small car, even at county speeds, the foam seats offer virtually no guidance or comfort in the bottom, but at least they don’t press into the spine, and the chassis, with nicely perpendicularly mounted long-stroke shock absorbers, is priceless on a bumpy city or dirt road.
I also took the Spring out on the highway once, where I coaxed 115 MPH out of it on a fully charged battery, but realistically I probably wouldn’t want to go any faster on thin Chinese tires. On the highway, I wouldn’t even be satisfied with the range, which noticeably and quickly dwindles above the hundred mark, and the promised 230 km turns into 150 very quickly. But that’s not such a problem, thanks to the combination of fast charging and a small battery. It takes the Sprint less than half an hour to get from 20 to 80%.
Let’s talk some more numbers. The load compartment provides a volume of up to 1,000 litres, a load capacity of 358 kg and a load area length of 1,172 mm, or a width between the wheel arches of 931 mm. A Europallet won’t fit here, but for delivery companies the space is plenty. You’ll also find four lugs in the floor for anchoring, which will certainly find practical use when transporting bulkier loads. Otherwise, don’t look for any other extras. There is still a repair kit under the foam reinforcement, but a full-size spare can also be stored here if someone really wanted to. With the rear pair of doors retained and the lightweight fifth door very easy to handle, the cargo area is also well accessible.
While the passenger Dacia Spring is now available with the more powerful Electric 65 powertrain, the Cargo version sticks with the Electric 45 powertrain we last encountered in the passenger version. Under the front bonnet, therefore, is an electric motor with a top output of 33 kW (44 hp), with peak power available between 3,000 and 8,200 rpm. Peak torque of 125 m then peaks between 500 and 2,500 rpm.
Although the curb weight is only 935 kilograms, those forty-four horsepower will pull the utility van from 0 to 100 km/h in 19.1 seconds. However, the Spring Cargo accelerates from zero to city 50 km/h in 5.8 seconds, which sounds considerably better. Meanwhile, the car definitely feels at its best in city streets, which is matched by its light steering and overall impressive agility.
The average consumption on my city circuit came out to 16 kWh per 100 kilometers. It should be noted that it was below zero and I heated my car as I would in a conventional car. As I mentioned before, the undeniable advantage here is the small 27.4 kWh battery with a DC charger of up to 33 kW, which makes charging very fast. You can even charge the small torch from 20 to 100% overnight, so after deliveries the Spring is nicely recharged with cheap current by morning and goes on delivering…
However, Spring has other advantages for corporate use. After all, electric cars require virtually no servicing, no regular oil changes, and their brakes don’t wear out much either, since the slowing down is primarily taken care of by regenerative braking. So only to the workshop once a year for a routine check-up, for example, and usually only to change some of that cabin filter.
Plus, the constant starting and warming up of a cooled engine that is typical of urban use, coupled with the short driving distances often in clogged city street environments, wears on internal combustion engine cars much more than electric cars in such conditions. These practically don’t care as they just switch off and on again.
Dacia offers the Spring Cargo in a single trim with a price tag of €20,250, including VAT, where you only pay extra for, for example, multimedia infotainment with parking camera (€520) and DC charging 30 kW (€600). Dacia also gives a standard vehicle warranty of 3 years / 100,000km and up to 8 years / 120,000km for the traction battery.
If we view Spring Cargo purely through the lens of EVs, then it is indeed the cheapest. But compared to other small cars, it doesn’t defend its price tag. For example, you can buy a Sandero like this for almost half the price on a basic basis. For the application, however, the Spring Cargo makes perfect sense. In town, it has easy parking thanks to its small size and hopefully in the future, an “electric tag”, and operators will certainly enjoy the cheap operation with no downtime when spending time in the workshop.
