Only 500 units of the Dacia Duster pickup are being made exclusively for a private company and will not be sold via Dacia dealerships across Europe.
If the spy shots of the Dacia Duster pickup from few months ago got you all excited, we have some good and some bad news for you. While the good news is that Dacia was indeed working on the pickup variant of the Duster compact SUV and has officially unveiled the final product, the bad news is that the Duster pickup will not be sold by the company at all. Instead, the pickup variant has been exclusively built by Dacia in collaboration with Romanian coachbuilder Romturinga that assembled the pickup variant for a private firm.
Built for OMV Petrom, the largest oil and gas company in Romania, the Dacia Duster pickup is based on the regular Duster 4×4 variant that draws power from the 1.5-litre dCi diesel motor producing 110 PS of power. The front fascia is the same as the regular variant, while the cabin has been cut down to just the two front seats and comes with reinforcements from the outside for better protection. At the rear, second row and boot space has been converted into a 1700 mm long flat bed that can carry up to 450 kgs of weight. The SUV gets no changes to the mechanicals. The company commenced work on the project back in 2012 and the pickup variant has been validated by Renault Group and Romanian Auto Registry (RAR).
Only 500 units of the Dacia Duster pickup will be actually built for OMV Petrom, and the first 10 units have already been handed over to the company. The remaining models will be delivered in a phased manner before the end of 2015. When asked about the company’s plans to launch a pickup variant of the Duster, Renault responded that the automaker has no such plans for the customer version. For those who cannot wait, you could also get in touch with the coachbuilder Romturinga to create an example for yourself. The cost of conversion from an SUV to a pickup is said to be around 3000 Euros (Rs. 2.33 lakhs). We do think though that Renault should seriously consider bringing the pickup variant of the Duster for the international markets.
