• Dacia is working on a small electric city car built on the same platform as the upcoming Renault Twingo EV.
• The new Dacia EV will result from an unusually short 16-month development cycle and debut sometime in 2026.
• It will cost €18,000 ($18,800) or around €2,000 ($2,100) more than its Renault twin.

Renault-owned Dacia found electric vehicle success in Europe with its super affordable Spring, which sold over 140,000 units between 2021 and 2024 when a heavily revised model was introduced. The Spring’s biggest problem, though, is that it’s manufactured in China through a Renault joint venture, so Dacia is now designing its own model, which it will manufacture in Europe, bypassing import tariffs imposed on electric cars coming into the European Union from the PRC.

It will grow in size and generally improve on the Spring in every measurable way, with more room and better technology. The Spring is, let’s not forget, just a reengineered and electrified version of the Renault Kwid, designed to be as cheap as possible to keep its cost down for markets such as India. Dacia extensively reengineered the original Renault model, but many of its compromises and weaknesses, like performance and safety, are still present in the Spring.

Dacia CEO Denis Le Vot said today that development work on the new electric A-segment model from the Romanian manufacturer will take just 16 months, and it’s targeting a price of €18,000, which is about $18,800 at current exchange rates. This is about the same price as today’s China-made Spring, whose facelift hasn’t seen the same success as the original, even though it fixes many of its issues.

The Dacia boss also shared a teaser sketch previewing the model, which looks like a traditional small hatchback rather than a more upright crossover. It wouldn’t be out of the question for Dacia to offer both the standard model and a raised Stepway variant of the new EV, to also bring in crossover buyers too. This strategy has worked wonders with the Sandero and its more rugged Stepway variant, Europe’s best-selling vehicle in 2024.

Dacia is very proud of its very short development process, but part of it can be explained by the fact that the new EV will share its underpinnings with the new electric Renault Twingo, whose design is all about 1990s nostalgia. Interestingly, even though the upcoming Twingo EV is built on the same AmpR Small platform as the 5 E-Tech, it will cost Renault around 40% less to build because it uses 30% fewer parts—just 750 components make up the whole vehicle, which is exceptionally low by modern car standards.

Dacia will look for ways to reduce costs even further, although it sounds like the bulk of the cost-saving work has already been done by the parent company Renault, which intends to sell Twingo for around €20,000 ($20,890). It’s not clear if the new small Dacia EV will be built at the company’s home plant in Romania or on the same assembly line as the new Twingo, but it should be unveiled and go on sale sometime in 2026. That’s one year ahead of the arrival of the next-generation Sandero, which is also getting a fully electric variant.