The £15k Dacia Spring remains the cheapest electric car you can buy in Britain that’s actually a car and not the sort of thing that can legally be driven by French children. Of course, with great cheapness comes… not particularly great power, with the most basic Spring making do with a piddly 44bhp electric motor.
That’s soon set to change, though, because the entry-level Spring Expression is getting a massive power increase of 57 per cent. Okay, that only sees the figure 69bhp, but still, that should make a real difference when the numbers are this low to begin with. In fact, it means the Expression is now more powerful than the previous 64bhp range-topping Spring Extreme, which itself is getting a bump to the heady heights of 99bhp.
Dacia Spring – rear
Dacia hasn’t given us full performance figures (because nobody’s really asking), but it has detailed the difference the extra power makes when going from 50 to 75mph. In the old 44bhp Spring, this took a lightly worrying 26.2 seconds, but that’s been slashed to a positively spritely 10.3 seconds in the new 69bhp car. The same figure drops from 14.0 to 6.9 seconds in the more powerful Extreme.
To make the most of this extra shove, the Spring gets a new 24.3kWh battery. This is actually a little smaller than the outgoing 26.8kWh one, but the drop in capacity is partially cancelled out by aero improvements. These comprise a set of underbody fairings and some very subtle winglets on the C-pillars, which drop the drag coefficient from 0.74 to 0.67. Dacia says it’ll do 5.0m/kWh, which works out at around 134 miles of range. That’s a little less than the 142 it quotes for the outgoing car, but let’s be real – nobody’s driving a Spring more than 142 miles in one go.
Dacia Spring – side
It’ll charge faster too, especially on the optional DC charger available on the Extreme, which now runs at 40kW instead of 30. Using this, Dacia says the Spring will go from 20 to 80 per cent juiced in 29 minutes.
Finally, to cope with the massive increase in power, the Spring gets a series of chassis tweaks too. These include carbon ceramic brakes, 10-stage adjustable dampers, active torque vectoring and ultra-light forged magnesium wheels. No, hang on, that’s the wrong set of notes. What the updated Spring actually gets is a reinforced battery housing for extra rigidity and optimised weight distribution, extra brake assistance, 15-inch wheels as standard, and, for the first time on the Spring, an anti-roll bar.
Full specs, pricing and a market launch date are all currently TBC, but Dacia promises the Spring will remain the most affordable electric car on sale – only now, it might actually be able to get out of its own way.
#Dacia #Spring #Cent #Power