The Dacia Bigster will be the Romanian firm’s range-topping SUV and it’s likely to be offered with seven seats and plug-in hybrid power.
Sounds expensive? Not a bit of it, Dacia is targeting a £20,000 price point for the Bigster so you’ll make a huge saving against similarly sized rivals such as the Volkswagen Tiguan, Hyundai Tucson and Kia Sportage.
For that you get an SUV with rugged good looks and none of the frivolous appendages you’ll find on other SUVs. Small alloys or even steel wheels will be the order of the day and black recycled plastics will be used for the bumpers and wheel-arch trims.
Dacia calls this ‘genuine’ design, what you see is what you get – a car that’s cheap to produce but also cheap to buy.
You’ll find more of the same on the inside. Hard plastics take the place of the spongy materials you’ll find in other SUVs and equipment levels will be adequate rather than lavish. Expect to get an infotainment screen with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto fitted as standard, and air-conditioning.
Dacia hasn’t confirmed if you’ll also get seven seats, but it would be a sensible feature to offer in an SUV this size as an extra row for kids or emergency seats for adults. Expect there to be loads of room in the first and second rows for tall adults and the boot will also be large at over 500 litres in capacity.
Cars costing the same as the Dacia – the Volkswagen T-Cross, for example – will feel terribly cramped by comparison.
Despite its size, the Dacia Bigster will likely be offered with the smaller capacity petrol you might expect to find in a dinky SUV like the VW.
A 1.0-litre petrol with up to 130PS, also found in the Renault Captur (Dacia uses lots of old Renault parts), will likely be one of the engines available in the Bigster, as will the Captur’s 115PS 1.5-litre diesel.
That said, hybrid power is also expected to be offered. Again, it would be the PHEV unit also used by the Captur which has a 1.6-litre petrol boosted by electric power to produce 160PS and give you a pure-electric range of 30 miles.
Despite its tree-hugging credentials, you can expect the Bigster to be capable of tearing up the countryside equally as well, with four-wheel drive available as an option. Dacia’s picture shows a car with steep approach, breakover and departure angles that should help it gobble up near-vertical gradients. Make use of those handy roof bars and you could have an excellent expedition car on your hands.
We expect to hear more about Dacia Bigster before the year is out, stay tuned for more soon.
