We take a road trip in Dacia’s entry-level EV!

There are great driving roads and then there's the Transfagarasan Highway. Chiseled into the apex of Romania's Carpathian Mountains, it's as if a supreme being reached down from the heavens and laid out the finest scale x-trip track for his or her pleasure. You might have seen it on an episode of Top Gear where Clarkson, Hammond and May climbed it in an Aston Martin DBS Volante, Very nice. But car likes a bit of a challenge so we plan to drive it in this. The Dacia Spring, which will be the UK's cheapest electric car when it's on sale in 2024. The car's official electric range is just 137 miles and less than that when you're climbing 2000 meters up a centigrade heat. Plus the distance from Bucharest to the Transfagarasan's focal point, Balia Lake, is 217 miles. We picked up the Spring in Bucharest this morning and we've driven about 100 kilometers to Potesti, our first charging stop and it's gone pretty well. We've got a 50 kilowatt DC charger. The Spring can only take about 34 kilowatts so it's been charging nicely, slight blip but we're almost at 100% now and almost ready to go to our destination. So we're going to head northwest up through Romania, discover Romania and get to know the Spring. The Spring is Dacia's first electric car which is assembled in China and sold there as a Renault and Dongfeng model. That helps deliver a low price as does the car's simplicity. It's just over 3.7 meters long and by offering a modest 26.8 kilowatt hour battery and only essential equipment, the Spring weighs less than one ton. There's a choice of two front motors. The base motor produces just 44 brake horsepower which will be the entry-level UK car costing around £18,000. We've got the Xtreme Electric 65 edition sending 64 brake horsepower to the front wheels and accelerating from 0-62mph in 13.7 seconds. While this hardware will remain the same for UK cars, our Spring will get a facelift and new features such as lane assistance and a speed limit warning to meet 2024 safety regulations. This stretch of motorway feels a bit like the autocar in the Spring because there are cars absolutely pelting up behind you and you've got to make sure you're not blocking behind a slower moving vehicle otherwise you're going to lose loads of momentum and the thing about the soft suspension setup at the steering is you come out, change lane and then when you try and correct back you can have this slightly pronounced listing action because of that soft suspension and lackadaisical roll. So sometimes you find yourself listing from lane to lane, position to position also does that to you. From Protesti we take the DN7 North, a key artery through this part of Romania. It's not a motorway but a single lane road absolutely choked with big lorries that have no option but to stampede through residential areas. With no exit lanes it's hard to get on it and the odd hairpin really keeps you on your toes. The Spring Extreme Electric 65 has a 64 brake horsepower motor turning the front wheels and the 0-62 time is slow. It's 13.7 seconds but that doesn't quite do justice to the power delivery. It's actually really good at delivering torque low down instantly like all electric cars but it doesn't have the shove of a Tesla. Of course it's not going to be 64 brake horsepower but it's fast enough to accelerate you up to speed and that's a good thing when you've got these massive HGVs bearing down on you on this single track road. Where you do feel the lack of grunt across the rev range with the motor is at the top end. So if you're accelerating up from say 90 kilometers an hour up to 130 kilometers an hour which is the maximum motorway speed in Romania that can be really incremental and it takes ages. So bear in mind this is not a car for big overtakes on a single road like this. However that is not what this car is for. This is a car for nipping about the city. It's perfect to just nip through narrow streets past obstacles like stone steps and pedestrians taking photos and it was absolutely in its element just jinking through the clogged city streets. Into the late afternoon the DN7 traffic lightens and we climb higher and higher winding our way through the beautiful Alt River valley. The spring just isn't at ease at motorway speeds when noticeable tyre and wind noise infiltrate the cabin and the nose needs quite a lot of correction. But the softly sprung suspension typically makes for a supple comfortable ride and the spring is very efficient. Although it takes two top-up charges to reach our final stop for the day we only add 26 kilowatt hours in total meaning the Spring Extreme has managed an impressive 4.73 miles per kilowatt hour. With the car fully charged we're ready for tomorrow's early morning ascent on the Transfagarasan Highway. So here we are it's just gone six o'clock in the morning we're in the Carpathian Mountains climbing up through the forest hopefully going to see one of the finest views across one of the finest roads in Europe. Popped out at the top and we're in this kind of glacial valley it is absolutely stunning up here and you can probably see the green and white pylons to the side there are these pillars supporting bigger concrete overhangs to prevent rock falls onto the road or the hairpin. Now the Sprint has quite a soft suspension it can feel it's a very light car for an electric car and it's got a certain agility. It's got a lovely almost French quality ride it's really composed it's really nice longitudinal compliance real suppleness and it is such a unpretentious pleasant car. So the steering is pretty much what you'd expect of a city car it's not super quick off the dead ahead it's modestly weighted it's pretty light and it's the feel of the pedals that's really nice. Get on the accelerator and it responds pretty quickly it has got that fast response to it and the brake pedal is really nice as well it's a nice crisply responding brake pedal gives you that retardation as soon as you call for it. By 9am the transfer garage is getting busy with cars and tourist buses coming up the mountain but we've had Europe's greatest road a real highway to heaven largely to ourselves for a few hours. It was a spectacular drive in Dacia's charming efficient and great value electric car which is coming to the UK in the second half of 2024.