Dacia readying new estate to rival Skoda Octavia

Dacia will go after the Skoda Octavia next year with a new rugged estate model that’s petrol-powered, off-road ready and priced at less than £25,000.

Due for launch in the coming months, the new model will play a crucial part in Dacia’s expansion into Europe’s most popular car market, the C-segment – which already accounts for a fifth of the firm’s sales, following the introduction of the Bigster SUV this year. A third C-segment model will arrive around a year later.

Dacia’s new CEO, Katrin Adt, told Autocar that the success of the Bigster has inspired confi dence within the company 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, noting that the Nissan Qashqai rival was in the top 10 best-selling retail cars for several key markets – including France and Germany – in July.

In order for this expansion to be successful, though, Adt 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 will be a totally different offer to the customer than the Bigster.”

Indeed, a leaked photo of what appears to be a late-stage prototype for the new model – codenamed C-Neo – shows that it will look effectively like a stretched and lifted Sandero, taking the form of a high-riding compact estate car that is 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 [which 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.’”

Dacia sales and marketing boss Frank Marotte agreed and said the impending 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.