“Let me put it to you this way – everyone knows what the Duster is. It’s a perfectly defined car; it costs around €20,000, it’s very sturdy, maybe a bit rough and tough. What we’re not trying to do here is to offer another, bigger Duster. What we are exactly doing is putting a new car in the middle of the table, in front of the C-segment buyers. That’s three million people.”
Denis Le Vot is one of the most straight-talking corporate executives you will meet. Born in Landivisiau in Brittany, he has been in charge of the Dacia brand since 2020. He has masterminded its massive recent successes, which have seen the compact Sandero hatchback unseat the mighty Tesla Model Y as Europe’s best-selling car last year. He’s someone who won’t equivocate about a question – he’ll either give you the answer or just flat-out tell you he’s not going to do so. Such honesty and openness are often too rare in this world.
While Le Vot has scored notable success with Dacia, he’s now taking on a big challenge – trying to take a brand known for its bargain-basement pricing and offering it to the most middle-class buyers of all, those purchasing so-called C-segment SUVs in Europe.
That segment accounts for 23 per cent of the total new car market in Europe and includes some of the best-selling cars around, such as the Nissan Qashqai, Hyundai Tucson, Kia Sportage, VW Tiguan, and Toyota RAV4. How can Le Vot tempt those buyers out of their familiar brands and into a supposedly cheap-and-cheerful Bigster?
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You can read our take on the Bigster’s individual qualities elsewhere, but Le Vot’s not planning on letting the car simply speak for itself. He wants to pull hard on the purse strings of mittel-Europa’s car buyers.
“We’ve been talking to buyers in Germany, which is the biggest market for C-segment models” Le Vot told The Irish Times. “And we’ve been asking them: ‘If I take this out, or that out, does it disqualify me?’ And that’s the reason that we’re now offering an electric tailgate and two-zone air conditioning for the Bigster, because they said: ‘If you don’t do that, I’m not buying the car.’”
Le Vot is counting on more than mere extra equipment in the new model to draw buyers in. He’s also counting on a certain amount of shock value.
“So, three million customers are going to replace their C-segment SUVs in 2025,” said Le Vot. “Now, the average transaction price across the whole segment in 2019 was €29,000. In 2024, it was €38,000. And so we’re looking for those among the three million who were used to paying around €30,000 for their car and now they’re being asked to pay around €38,000, and they’re saying: ‘Well, I don’t have that kind of money.’
[ Ford’s new electric Puma is on the prowl in a very crowded marketOpens in new window ]
“So what we, at Dacia, need to say is that across the other side of the street is one of our dealers, and he’s proposing to you that you can have a car for the price you used to pay, but it still has all of the stuff you’re used to.”
Dacia is part of the Renault Group, and Renault itself has seen the sharp edge of this equation. Last year, Dacia outsold Renault, certainly in Ireland and definitely in other European markets, and Renault’s own C-segment SUV offerings have all increased in price too. So at what point does Dacia start to bite the corporate hand that feeds it?
Not yet, says Le Vot. “Let’s say that the three million people buying C-segment cars is represented in this room here,” he said. “So, the part of the segment that is Renault is maybe these three chairs over here. So, preventing ourselves from having such a fantastic offer in the C-segment and making lots of happy clients? It’s not a great thing to do, and let’s be clear, with Luca [Luca De Meo, Renault Group chief executive] there’s no glass ceiling for Dacia.”
Le Vot went on to say that Dacia has already taken 10,000 orders for the new Bigster, even before it hits dealerships, and that gives the company an insight into what cars those buyers are trading out of. According to his figures, 84 per cent of those buyers are so-called ‘conquest sales’, which means that the buyers have not previously owned either a Dacia or a Renault model. Of the remaining 16 per cent, 10 per cent is made up of existing Dacia owners looking to trade up to a larger car, and the remaining 4 per cent are trading in Renault models.
“So in answer to your question, it’s only 6 per cent of our total sales volume, and that’s still going towards creating value for the group as a whole.” Le Vot claims that 85 per cent of Dacia buyers go on to either buy a new Dacia again or move to another vehicle from within the Renault Group. Such customer loyalty is hard to come by.
One area where Dacia lags behind the mainstream competition is in its safety rating. The brand has often resisted fitting the sort of high-end electronic safety gizmos needed to score a maximum five-star rating from the independent crash test experts at Euro NCAP, and Le Vot says that this won’t be changing just because the company is now chasing more demanding customers.
[ Renault’s Symbioz is a symbol of the total SUV takeoverOpens in new window ]
“We are not chasing star scores, let me be super-clear about that,” said Le Vot. “We care very much about passive safety, but on the active – on the electronics – we’re not chasing that. When we spoke to those potential customers in Germany, this was okay with them.
“The truth is that Dacia is about making choices, for instance, about lane-keeping assistance. Many of us just turn this function off, and so if it’s something that lots of people just don’t use, then we won’t sell it.
“When we talk to our customers, value for money is the number one thing for them, and then it’s style. But the third is ‘essentiality’. They don’t want a car which doesn’t have buttons, which has 55 screens and connected surfaces, and a massaging seat that also cuts your hair.”
