DACIA DUSTER

Is Dacia’s third-gen SUV really too good to be true? Let's find out

- WILL RIMELL

WHY WE'RE RUNNING IT To see if a sub-£27,000 price tag really does give you all the car you'll ever need

We Brits love a bargain. Seeking them out has become our cost-of-living-crisis national pastime. Walk down any high street (yes, they do still exist) or scour the supermarket aisles and you'll see the buy-one-get-one-free, three-for-two, 50%-off rollback price-match offers at every turn. Yet these deals often aren’t quite what they seem, so you have to shop with your eyes wide open to make real savings.

So when a genuine value-for-money proposition comes around, we're right to be sceptical - as I was the first time I saw how much, or rather how little, Dacia was asking for the new Duster. Here was a genuinely good-looking car priced new - in 2025 - at under £20,000. What's the catch?

Apparently there isn’t one. So now here I am, standing in parent group Renault's London West dealership near Richmond waiting for the covers to be pulled off ‘my’ new Duster. To say I'm excited would be somewhat understating matters. I’ve owned many cars over the years, all of which have been second-hand, so the ‘handover’ such as it was tended to involve a set of keys being slid across a desk after a (relatively modest) payment had been approved. So all this fuss and palaver makes me feel quite special.