The Dacia Spring is widely regarded as the value champion of practical, usable EVs but now it has a credible £16k rival in the UK: the Leapmotor T03. ILLYA VERPRAET pits them against each other

PHOTOGRAPHY JACK HARRISON

Electric cars, and new cars in general, are expensive. You know it, we know it, and even though they prefer to draw your attention to attractive-looking finance deals and the potential savings of electric driving, car makers know it.

Yes, they do appear to be trying to improve things (while protecting their bottom line, of course) but the various innovative ‘mobility solutions’ have proved to be deeply inadequate for most people and cheap ‘cars’ like the Citroën Ami are a case of being careful what you wish for. We want cheap cars, but not like that.

Affordable petrol cars are bad for car makers’ CO2 quotas and, in spite of the demand from customers, are increasingly difficult to make a profit on. Of the five sub-£15,000 cars we gathered together for a group test in 2023, only Dacia’s Sandero remains below that mark today.

The situation might be changing, though. The relentless march of progress means that the platforms aimed at developing markets may now be perceived as more acceptable over here. Meanwhile, battery costs are (slowly) coming down. So if you package a modest number of cheaper cells in one of those cheaper platforms, you might actually end up with a very decent yet affordable electric car.

That recipe has been used for both the Dacia Spring Electric and the Leapmotor T03. Both are available for well under £20,000, can seat four people, are capable of motorway speeds and exceed 140 miles on the combined cycle. On the face of it, Mini and Honda were asking over £30,000 for the same sort of thing not so long ago.

Sounds good, but there is the danger that we’re dealing with the Temu version of the Honda E and Mini Electric here: attractive on paper but horribly compromised in functionality. Encouragingly, both manufacturers are reputable enough to dispel such concerns.

Dacia’s reputation speaks for itself by now. The Duster, Sandero and Jogger are brilliant examples of all the car you need, nothing you don’t. It’s not that Dacia reduces a car to its bare essentials but, more significantly, it does the essentials so, so well.

The Spring is slightly different. It’s based on the Renault Kwid, which was launched in India in 2015 and gained early infamy for its disastrous crash test results. (Look it up on YouTube: it’s eye-widening.) Since then, it has been updated with better crash structures, airbags, a couple of facelifts and latterly a pack of batteries under the floor. The electric version, which is built in China, is sold as a Renault elsewhere but came to mainland Europe a few years ago as the Dacia Spring.