Renault owned Dacia has confirmed that it will not launch a budget minded minicar aimed at the Volkswagen Up! and the Fiat Panda in the foreseen future. Earlier this year, the French and German media had reported that Dacia has plans of bringing a minicar to the European market. The minicar segment has seen fair growth in Europe for sometime now. With the current economy slowdown, customers are downsizing their cars to some smaller and cheaper models and this news from Renault comes as a surprise as Dacia is known to offer some great cars at low prices.
Germany’s Autobild recently published that Dacia would launch a five door minicar by 2015 that would combine the underpinnings of the Renault Twingo with the design cues from Dacia’s Sandero which is currently the lowest priced car from Dacia. According to Autobild, this car would be priced at around 5000 euros ($6450 or Rs. 3.65 lakhs). The car would have a larger wheelbase than the Twingo adding to added space and a larger luggage capacity. But the French automaker said that it wants to avoid too many cars as the brand awareness of Dacia is quite low in the European market.
With a 6.3 percent market share, Dacia is the fifth most popular car manufacturer in France. European sales have increased by an impressive 700 percent since 2005 but the firm only represents 2.5 percent of the new car market. The future looks bright as Dacia’s sales through Europe grew by 18 percent to 90,000 units in the first four months of this year. Dacia currently offers five models in Europe with the Sandero and Duster being their bestsellers with sales of around 30,000 units each in the first four months this year. It now remains to be seen whether the Romanian company’s plans of not investing in new models goes the right way.
Source – AutoNews Europe
