Here’s The New Renault Twingo’s Serious Cousin From Romania

Everybody loves the new Renault Twingo. Yes, even those who have never heard about it, because the moment you lay your eyes on this happy-looking city car that comes in real colors, you’re rooting for it. Sure, it’s only got 80 horsepower, and yes, it’s an electric car that can manage around 160 miles at best, but it looks so good and it looks so right. It’s a successful update of the wacky 1990s-2000s original to the late 2020s, and I can’t wait to get to drive one.

Dacia, the Romanian carmaker, is pretty much Renault’s reliable sidekick as its cars have traditionally been based on Renault architecture from day one. It only makes sense that Dacia’s new entry-level EV is also based on the Twingo, to benefit from platform-sharing synergies. The time has now come to update Dacia’s Spring, and for the Spring to get to use the Twingo’s bones is what they called a “Good Change” in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

What Even Is The Dacia Spring?

First of all, the original Dacia Spring was launched a few years ago, in 2021. It was Dacia’s first foray into electric cars, and since they had to make it cheap, Dacia based it on the cheapest thing it could find: the Renault Kwid, which is a developing-market gasoline-engined hatchback designed to cost nothing to build, and which also spawned an electric variant, the Renault City K-ZE, developed in partnership with the Chinese Dongfeng.

Since it had to cost just a few thousand new in India, the base Kwid was engineered on a dime, which meant it did terribly in crash tests. The battery pack in the Spring’s floor probably helped stiffen it up, but I still wouldn’t want to crash one. If you think of a generic European car-sharing vehicle, this is very close to it.

Dacia didn’t make a lot of noise about it, but when the Spring came on sale in Europe, instead of truly being The First Romanian Electric Car Offered to the Public, it was in fact a Chinese-built Renault EV wearing Dacia badging.

Looking back, it was likely the first China-built car I had ever driven, and while I did have my hopes up – I wanted a cheap, cheap EV lease – it wasn’t really much more sophisticated than a Fiat Topolino, which would arrive a couple of years later, even if it was classified as a real car and had a rear seat unlike the Fiat and its Citroën Ami cousin.

The Spring was successfully updated a couple years later with a facelift, which gave it chunkier looks and a new cabin, yet kept it cheap. Amusingly, it was also sold as the Dacia Spring Extreme, which sounds like it was designed for lousy Smarch weather.

The Spring Has Sprung Like Never Before

But now, as the Twingo has been rolled out and sales are ramping up, it’s time for the Spring to really flower, even in September. This week, Dacia launched the new, Twingo-based 2027 Spring, which will be built at the same factory as the Twingo in Novo Mesto, Slovenia. It’s still not built in Romania, but since it’s effectively a rebranding exercise, it’s fine.

Since the Twingo has been painstakingly engineered to be as affordable as possible, for a sub-20,000 Euro starting price, making an even cheaper version with a Dacia design will have required some careful thinking, even if it took the company just 16 months to speed it through the development stage.

It also means some of the Twingo’s hallmark stuff will have had to be left out, including the sliding rear seat that perfects the balance between rear seat room and cargo space in the Renault – but since the sliding seat was always a Twingo thing and something people remember from the original car, the Spring doesn’t necessarily need it. Come to think of it, nearly everything in the new Spring will be a bonus compared to earlier ones.

The dashboard follows the blocky and modular styling of other Dacias, with a recycled blue plastic finish on top, while the Twingo has a glossy round shape to the dash, with trim that’s color-matched to the exterior color. In daily driving, the Spring’s beeps and bongs can also be silenced with just two presses of the MySafety button next to the steering wheel, like in Renaults.

And just in case, the Spring also has a longer rear overhang than the Twingo, so it has a bigger 337-liter trunk than the Twingo’s 307 liters. Both cars are four-seaters, and the rear seats have a 50/50 fold as a result. The rear windows are pop-out instead of rolling down, like with the Twingo, to save costs and effort.

Lose The Roundness

You can only really notice the Spring’s relation to the Renault from looking at the windows. The sheet metal is unique to the Dacia from the windows down, and the rear end has this Opel/Vauxhall Signum thing going on with the rear window/tail light design.

Dacia’s designers have deleted the roundness that makes the Twingo easy to sketch on a napkin and replaced it with a serious look that’s slightly more appliance-like, especially in the underwear blue that appears to be the launch color.

Since the Twingo always needed to look like a Twingo (something the 2007-on second generation car never did), the Spring is more free to look like whatever they can make it, as long as it has the blockiness that Dacia includes in all its cars today. There are a lot of unpainted surfaces that just have easter egg detailing instead.

The Twingo/Spring (Springo?) isn’t the only Renault-based badge-engineering job currently out there, as the new generation Renault 5 has been redesigned to be sold as the Nissan Micra. The Micra does look more like an R5 than the Spring resembles the Twingo, but that’s largely because of the distinctive roof shape.

Nissan will introduce the new PIXO city car later this month, and it is likely to be yet another interpretation of the Twingo platform and chassis, just with a Nissan identity that will bring in inspiration from the Pike Factory cars – remember the Pao, Figaro, Be-1 and Rasheen? Keep an eye on those side windows, as they are likely to keep their shape even in the Nissan.

Is It Cheap Enough For A Cheap Dacia?

To keep things simple, there will only be one Spring version on offer, priced below 18,000 Euros in some European countries such as Italy. The battery is just 27kWh in size, with the aforementioned 80 horsepower motor and an estimated 155 miles of range (WLTP). For a city car and a commuter, that’s absolutely fine, especially if you can just plug it in at work as well as at home.

However, in the UK you can get the outgoing, still Chinese-built Old Spring (is that an aftershave?) for just £12,000, which is 14,000 Euros or $16k. The new one will be priced at around £18,000 in the UK, or $24k. Naturally, various subsidies and grants will play a role in different European countries when it comes to pricing the Spring, and I don’t have a clue whether our Finnish market will even get the car.

Make no mistake, the new car is a lot more car, wider and longer, even if the drivetrain numbers don’t change much: the battery size goes up from 24kWh, power is boosted to 80 hp from 70 in the base version, and range is improved by 15 miles at best. Top speed is 130km/h (80 mph), and the car gets to 62 mph in some 12 seconds, with 175Nm of torque (129 lb-ft).

The old car has also been offered with a 100-horsepower electric motor, which is peppier than what you can get in the new Spring. Still, the outgoing car is a facelift version of the old, dinky Spring, and the 2027 version will definitely be more substantial.

Fast charging speeds remain at 50kW max, but you can spec the car with three-phase 11kW AC charging instead of the standard 6.6 kW setup.

It’s also worth noting that as these cars won’t have active battery temperature management to save costs and will instead rely on passive (air) cooling while driving, in hot and cold temps, the DC fast charging speeds in the Twingo, Spring, and the upcoming Nissan are likely to be pretty sucky. It’s better to plug in the 11kW AC charging cable instead, since the tiny battery is quickly topped up with that, and AC charging has been proven to be better for the battery over time.

The presence of the Twingo and Spring on the market is significant. While the Dacia Sandero costs about the same and keeps topping European sales charts, European carmakers have largely steered away from the small city car segment due to regulations making it increasingly difficult to sell small cars profitably. As a result, many of the usual small cars either haven’t received a successor or will just grow up a size, with a bigger price tag.

The Ford Fiesta is gone, reportedly to be replaced by an EV version again based on the Renault R5 E-Tech; the VW Polo is gone, replaced by the ID.Polo, which is again an EV. Fiat designed the new Panda as a Grande Panda, making it bigger, but it will also sell the old version as long as it’s legally possible, as the Pandina, which is at its heart based on a 2004 design.

With average car prices and fuel prices going up (think $10/gal across Europe), to be able to buy or lease a small EV for a relatively sensible cost sounds good to me, as long as it fits your life and your use case. Forget having just a beater with a heater – this is all about using CarPlay in a charging bay.

(Images: Dacia unless otherwise noted)