It produces 44bhp, which sounds meagre even by city car standards. It doesn’t feel that way around town, though, and at least until you get up beyond 40mph, because you also get 92lb ft of torque at low motor speeds (which, with a single-speed transmission, also means low road speeds).
Out of town, it does struggle a little for oomph. Dacia’s official 0-62mph claim is a whisker under 20sec, and it’s probably only because we’ve tested one or two cars in recent years that won’t even do 62mph that we’ve experienced slower acceleration.
Top speed is a heady 78mph – in this case, I suspect, actually a practical, mechanical threshold, not a ‘sensible’ electronically governed one.
But I would bet that 0-40mph performance is a lot more respectable (we will road test one soon enough and find out).
This cheapest version has a lab test range of 140 miles and will promise you around 130 on a full battery, tumbling to about 110 if you’re doing exclusively motorway miles.
No, it’s not much. But it’s more than you would have got from the Honda E a few years ago – a £34,000 car in 2020.
This Spring will cost you less than half of that in 2024, so you’re Kwids in (don’t worry: I’m not actually here every week).
The bigger usability hurdle for it might be charging, because it will only accept AC electricity. It’s not the kind of EV that you can plug in at Chieveley services and pick up another 100 miles of range in half an hour.
The quickest rate it can take is 7.4kW, which means a little under four hours waiting in a garden centre’s car park if you happen to need to go from almost empty to brim full (precisely the scenario in which I find myself as these words are being written. Ooh, Edinburgh Woollen Mill…).
Will that be a problem for it? I shouldn’t think so. Most people will charge their Springs at home, use them exclusively for short-hop trips and turn to other, more suitable cars for longer journeys. Because ‘people’, unlike road testers, aren’t idiots.
