Few cars are cheap anymore. Those that are, on various corners of the internet, are written off as rubbish because they don’t come with a billion horsepower or much sex appeal. The internet can be wrong about a lot of things. The Dacia Sandero is a cheap car, and it’s a rather charming little egg. James May championed the original, and I’d wager he’d dig the latest example you see here.
Weighing in at £12,155 (a shade over $15,000 at current rates) before options, the Sandero isn’t earth shatteringly expensive. The one I tested was £14,945, or around $18,500, in Expression TCe 90 spec with metallic paint and an optional spare wheel. If you’re diligent you can pick one up on a monthly deal for (after a cursory Google) as little as £140 a month — roughly what a 20-something spends on beer every Friday night in London. For your hard earned you get… not much, but enough: Five seats, a 11.6-cubic-foot trunk (39 cubic feet with the seats down), a five-speed stick, a 91-hp, 118-lb-ft 1.0-liter motor, a natty infotainment screen (with CarPlay and Android Auto), air conditioning, and, erm, that’s kinda it. So far, aggressively A Car then.
The lack of bells and whistles can feel a little disconcerting, especially in an age where if your car doesn’t have an AI that monitors your every bowel movement or doesn’t claim it’ll drive itself (even if that’s not quite true) it’s seen as behind the times. However, Dacia isn’t about all that keeping up with the Joneses crap, and never will be. Its mission has been to make good, practical, affordable cars for people who need transport, not ornaments for people with empty lives to brag about on Instagram.
On the styling front there’s not too much to say about the Sandero. It’s a small hatchback, and looks kinda like you’d expect it to. There’s a hood with a motor under it attached to a box. Dacia’s recent logo change adds few neat details — the DC badge on the snout draws your eye nicely, and the brand name on the trunk lid is pleasingly striking. Its head- and taillamps have some cool details, but otherwise it’s a box with wheels. If you were going to design a car to blend into the background of a GTA game, this is kinda what you’d end up with.
Inside it’s similarly unremarkable. There’s plenty of cost-friendly plastic, manual controls for the A/C, a simple instrument panel with analog dials, cloth seats, and plenty of cubby holes for real-life stuff to go in. Again, the new branding brings some shiny touches — the new logo’s pointiness is mirrored in the HVAC vents, the white piping gives the interior a little pop here and there. The dash is trimmed in a white/black fabric, too, which elevates the interior a bit. Little touches like that make something that could easily be incredibly dull feel a little livelier. Just because it’s cheap, it doesn’t have to be drab.
Dacia’s infotainment screen is big and responsive enough, sure, but the real party piece is the phone cradle built into the side. A USB-A port sits just below, so you can stick your phone front and center should you want to. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto should be super handy… but they aren’t. It’s one of the biggest gripes I found with the car during my time with it: While CarPlay will connect and start working via a cable, after five-ish minutes it disconnected. After reconnecting and trying again it did the same thing over and over. I bought a new iPhone cable to see if that would remedy it, and it didn’t. The phone I was using is just a few weeks old, too. You can still hook your phone up via Bluetooth and listen to your favorite tunes that way, but that tiny bug takes the shine off a charmingly simple pie.
Despite its low-cost ethos, the Sandero comes with a key card, and starts on a button. Once you’ve dipped the clutch and fired up its fearsome 1.0-liter of fury, the cabin fills with a gentle, not very exciting thrum. The stick shift has a fairly long, pleasingly light throw, so slotting first is easy. It requires a little encouragement to get going, as there’s not much torque to play with, but once you’re moving, so long as you keep the revs above 2,000, you’ll be laughing. The car itself weighs 2,366 pounds, and once you’re up to speed it’s rather easy to keep it there. The suspension is soft, so potholes don’t cause too much concern, which means you can happily breeze through town without worrying about shaking your eyes out. The brakes are strong enough to avoid a pedestrian walking out in the middle of the road, too.
Taking it out on some wibblier roads, the little Dacia shows some fighting spirit. Its soft springs mean you lean into corners with some decent vigor. Though its steering is far from pin-sharp, you find yourself gleefully sawing away at the wheel like a touring car driver possessed. Due its minuscule power, you can pin the gas everywhere and go not very fast while thrumming rather loudly. You can stretch yourself, and the car, without fear it’ll spit you off into the weeds at any given moment. It’s a joyous thing to hoon, because to the casual observer you’re barely hooning at all. The sprint from zero to 62mph takes 12.2 seconds, and it’ll clip 109 mph, but it’s more about comfort than speed.
Heading to the highway you’ll find things a little noisy, and the tiny motor struggles a bit to hit higher speeds, but it’s far from hopeless. You need to work with it a little to get it up there as, well, it’s a city car not a cruiser. All told, it managed a decent 36.6 mpg during my time with it, which isn’t bad considering I was largely hooning.
The thing about the Sandero is that it’s unashamedly little more than basic transport. A way for young buyers, families, and whoever else to get from A to B without getting wet if it rains. It has more than enough space in the trunk, there’s ample room in the back for normal sized humans, the stereo isn’t awful (CarPlay aside), and its powertrain is entertaining. The Sandero is a no-frills hatch with a warm heart, and that’s the best news of all.
