The mighty Dacia Sandero is shockingly cheap. It's also rather useful family transport, writes William Scholes,
who found himself won over by its honesty. WE are supposed to be in the grip of a recession and a squeeze on credit and, even if sales figures from premium brands like Audi and BMW tell a different story, everyone is keen for a bargain.
It's one of the reasons that so-called value brands like Kia, Hyundai and Skoda have also prospered of late; marrying highly competitive prices to excellent cars that consumers really like is a potent combination.
Caught in the middle of the pincer movement between the value and premium brands are Europe's formerly dominant mass market players - companies like Ford, Vauxhall, Fiat, Peugeot and Citroen.
They are employing various tactics in an effort to ensure their survival. For example, Renault, another one of these squeezed companies, has an alliance with Nissan and has also bet a large part of its future on electric vehicles.
But it has another weapon in its fight for survival its budget brand Dacia.
"Budget" is the key word. Or, as Dacia itself describes its offering, "shockingly affordable"; at £5,995 the base model Dacia Sandero is the UK's cheapest new car.
You may remember Dacia's last foray from its base in Romania into Northern Ireland in the early 1980s with a rebadged version of the already outdated Renault 12. As was the way with eastern European cars of the era - Skoda, Lada, FSO and Yugo among them - the Dacia was crude, outmoded, unreliable and pretty hopeless.
Fast forward 30 years and things have completely changed. Renault now owns Dacia, has built it state-of-the-art factories and given the cars con-temporary design and engineering, helped in no small part by using tried-and-tested Renault engines and other parts.
The reversal in Skoda's fortunes is proof that the careful stewardship of a western European owner can produce astonishing results, and Renault is doing something very similar with Dacia.
Low labour costs in Romania plus those Renault parts help explain how Dacia cars are just so cheap.
Austerity pricing hasn't come at the expense of robustness, however. When Renault bought Dacia in 1999, the original focus was on designing and building cars for central Europe and places like Russia, north Africa and South America - places where reliability, affordability and practicality were priorities.
But Dacia's no-nonsense appeal caught on in western Europe and at the start of this year, the UK became the last so-called mature market to be entered by the Renault off-shoot.
The range is straightforward. The Sandero hatch-back offers more space for passengers and luggage than any pretty much any other car in its price bracket - something like the room of a Volkswagen Polo for the price of a VW Up - while the Sandero Stepway is its jacked-up and butcher crossover brother.
The Dacia Duster is a small SUV which starts at £8,995. Even the four-wheel-drive model starts at just £10,995.
The Sandero was my first experience of the brand and I came away very impressed.
With black plastic bumpers and no radio, the sub£6k Sandero Access redefines poverty spec. It must be more spartan in there than the dolmen at the Giant's Ring.
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