Dacia Sandero - What a neat little car!

Joined
Mar 10, 2017
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Location
South Wales, UK
As most of you are in the US and you have a shortage of small city cars I thought some of you would be interested in this.

Dacia is a Romanian brand that are owned by Renault and generally they are what I like to refer to as 'parts bin specials'. They're built using tried and tested Renault and Nissan parts that have already had the R&D done on them. They're sold as a budget brand no-nonsense white good type of car in the UK for getting you to A-B and not a lot else. They're in quite high demand over here and as a result hold onto their value very well. They start at less than £7,000 brand new and even a 6 year old model with 70k+ will still set you back the best part of £4,000.

A little bit of history, my Wife had a 3 door 2013 VW Polo back in 2017 which we had only owned for 9 months when we found out she was pregnant. Unfortunately as we bought more and more baby-stuff in readiness for his arrival we quickly realised the Polo wasn't going to cut the mustard and we started shopping for a bigger car. We came across a 2016 Dacia Duster which is a Ford Kuga sized crossover. They are heavily based on the Nissan Juke/Rogue Sport (Quashqai in the UK) platform. Our Duster had a 1.5 litre, 4 cylinder turbo diesel engine with a 6 speed manual gearbox and 4WD. We owned ours for 2 years and it was fully dependable, albeit we only did 14,000miles in that time. It was brilliant on rubbish runs to the tip, was great when we moved house, it was great in the snow, was comfortable on long journeys and did 50+ MPG.

As the Duster was coming up to it's 3 year anniversary we popped it into Renault to have a few niggles looked at before the warranty run out. While we were waiting to pick up the Duster in the dealer my Wife started nosing around a Dacia Sandero and my Wife and I started having a conversation about it. We came to the conclusion that now our little dude is 10 months old and we no longer needed a carry cot, 10 changes of clothes, a pram and half the house that maybe it was time to change back to a smaller car. We started speaking to the salesman who let us try the babies pram in the boot and after we found out it fit we started discussing figures.

We'd paid £10,000 for the Duster and after 2 years, 14,000miles and 3 oil changes we were offered £8,650 for it.
shocked2.gif
Safe to say we bit his hand off and placed an order for a brand new Sandero.

So the Sandero itself...

It's a Fiesta sized car that's powered by a Nissan/Renault 900cc 3 cylinder turbo engine that makes 90bhp and 99lbft. It gets from standstill to 60mph in 10.2s and will go on to do 112mph. It has enough power to keep up with day to day traffic in the UK and it's an adequate performer on the motorway, it will sit quite happily at 85-90mph for hours on end and still return 40mpg. Admittedly, compared to a 1.4 or 1.6 N/A engine that would make similar power you do tend to drive it at slightly higher revs, but it makes a lovely 3 cylinder growl and even makes some little turbo noises. The engine is fairly simple too, it has a timing chain, it's port injected and the turbo is wastegate controlled.

It has A/C, sat nav, electric windows, DAB radio and a trip computer.

Oil choice is straight forward, anything that meets RN0710 or if you cannot find an oil that meets RN0710 then a 5w30 or 5w40 that meets A3/B4. I've picked to run Fuchs GT1 5w40 which is an ACEA C3 lube with LL04, 502/505/505.01, Dexos2, 229.31, 226.5 and RN0710 approval. I'll be changing out the engine and gearbox factory fill at 1000miles.

See uploaded pictures!

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Good score....you did your shopping wisely.
Cardiff and Swansea....been there.

Any vehicle is only as good as the maintenance it receives....you knew that.

Best of luck with it
 
Originally Posted by Kira
Good score....you did your shopping wisely.
Cardiff and Swansea....been there.

Any vehicle is only as good as the maintenance it receives....you knew that.

Best of luck with it




I'm from Bridgend, bang in the middle of Swansea and Cardiff. Both Cities are 20 miles each way up the M4. It's quite a nice part of the UK to live, although I would say that, I live there!

The car will only do 5,000 - 6,000miles a year so I will probably perform yearly oil changes then every 2 or 3 years I'll do a full service changing all the filters, plugs, gearbox oil and brake fluid.
 
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Good cars ~ when I worked in Bucharest … a business partner took me around Constanta in his Duster …
He was Dutch and it was leased … said he owned a Chrysler 300 …
 
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"He was Dutch... said he owned a Chrysler 300 …"

Funny thing about European guys who own American cars. You never know if they selected the car of fell into it somehow.
 
Oil changes every 2-3 years! Egads--between my three vehicles I'm doing at least one a month.

Cool little car. You guys get all the cool stuff.
 
I am absolutely shocked at realizing that half of the terms used by OP went over my head even though I did get the gist of it. So much difference between the English language that is spoken by British versus by American :)
 
Originally Posted by supton
Oil changes every 2-3 years! Egads--between my three vehicles I'm doing at least one a month.

Cool little car. You guys get all the cool stuff.


I think you misread that. He said yearly oil, followed by 2-3 years for rest of maintence.

Originally Posted by Bailes1992

The car will only do 5,000 - 6,000miles a year so I will probably perform yearly oil changes then every 2 or 3 years I'll do a full service changing all the filters, plugs, gearbox oil and brake fluid.
 
Originally Posted by Rand
Originally Posted by supton
Oil changes every 2-3 years! Egads--between my three vehicles I'm doing at least one a month.

Cool little car. You guys get all the cool stuff.


I think you misread that. He said yearly oil, followed by 2-3 years for rest of maintence.

Originally Posted by Bailes1992

The car will only do 5,000 - 6,000miles a year so I will probably perform yearly oil changes then every 2 or 3 years I'll do a full service changing all the filters, plugs, gearbox oil and brake fluid.


Ah, I stand corrected. I'll blame lack of coffee.
wink.gif
 
Originally Posted by Vikas
I am absolutely shocked at realizing that half of the terms used by OP went over my head even though I did get the gist of it. So much difference between the English language that is spoken by British versus by American :)


Two countries separated by a common language.
 
Originally Posted by Bailes1992
Our Duster had a 1.5 litre, 4 cylinder turbo diesel engine with a 6 speed manual gearbox and 4WD. We owned ours for 2 years and it was fully dependable, albeit we only did 14,000miles in that time. It was brilliant on rubbish runs to the tip, was great when we moved house, it was great in the snow, was comfortable on long journeys and did 50+ MPG.



For garbage runs to the tip, I'd rather not share the cabin with the refuse. Are pickup trucks still a rarity in the UK?
 
I was waiting for the cries of "You can't have something that small as a family car!" from our US brethren. Perfect. It's all the vehicle you need. We had 3 young kids (all in car seats, 2 still in prams) and the family car was a 2004 Ford Focus sedan...did the job easily.
 
We were getting there at one time, but something went awry and we now have mainly largish CUVs as family transport.
I loved the smaller cars that we had and if you like this Dacia you would have loved one of our eighties Civic Wagons.
Alas, the middle classes here have decided that more car than you need is somehow better.
 
Originally Posted by Lolvoguy
Originally Posted by FordBroncoVWJeta
[Linked Image]


Exactly what I thought of when I read the thread title!
lol.gif



Same here
grin.gif
 
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