Dacia to reveal details of new Skoda Octavia rival "in coming months"

Dacia will reveal the first official details of its new Skoda Octavia rival by March – and the rugged estate is set to be a petrol-powered, off-road-ready wagon priced at less than £25,000.

The new model, codenamed C-Neo, will arrive later this year and will play a crucial part in Dacia’s expansion into Europe’s most popular car market, the C-segment.

This already accounts for a fifth of the Romanian firm’s sales, following the introduction of the Bigster SUV this year. A third, as-yet-unknown C-segment model will also join the line-up in 2027.

Now Dacia has confirmed to Autocar that it will share more details on the incoming model "in the coming months".

CEO Katrin Adt previously told Autocar that the success of the new Bigster, which amassed 67,573 sales last year, has inspired confidence within Dacia that the brand can continue to expand within the highly competitive C-segment.

“Our main territory currently is the B-segment, but we have also offerings in the A-segment and we have started in the C-segment, and we did that quite amazingly well with the Bigster,” she said.

"You need to watch out that every car has its own place in the segment – its own purpose – and you can be pretty sure that this [the C-Neo] will be a totally different offer to the customer than the Bigster.”

A leaked photo of what appears to be a late-stage prototype shows that the C-Neo will look effectively like a stretched and lifted Sandero, taking the form of a high-riding compact estate that's expected to be around 4.6m long.

Product performance boss Patrice Lévy-Bencheton said: “There is also a significant share of the C-segment which is non-SUV people, who are still looking for a lower driving position, a more efficient product [that is] less ostentatious. For some, an SUV is a bit ostentatious.”

He added that there is a significant proportion of buyers in this space who want “the performance, the comfort and the pleasure of having a slightly bigger car but who are not attracted by the SUV shape and who think: ‘We have to go for a more efficient product, more elegant.’”

Marotte agreed and said the retirement of the Ford Focus and increasing prices of its contemporaries – such as the Volkswagen Golf, Vauxhall Astra and Toyota Corolla – have opened up an opportunity for Dacia in this segment, where it plans to undercut all major competitors, just as it did with the Bigster (pictured below).