Dacia’s small SUV is a robust-looking outdoorsy tank offering huge value for money. This generation is more sophisticated – and expensive – than before, but has fully embraced its reputation for enabling big adventures for smaller budgets. Is this Peak Duster?

Reports by Adam Binnie

Update 1: Stardust(er)

Research by Dacia* claims we start to lose our sense of adventure from the age of 36, due to physical and mental fatigue, financial pressure, and increased responsibility. As a 37-year-old father of two, these words speak directly to my fatigued, pressured soul.

Recently I’ve noticed the hassle and expense of doing something new outweighs the joy of doing it – even when I can be bothered, everything needs to be booked in advance and costs a fortune, so it doesn’t happen. Clearly this is not a sustainable situation and something must be done, otherwise my life is going to become very boring.

I’m hoping Europe’s best private-selling SUV** can do something to redress this balance for me. Dacia has a huge catalogue of accessories aimed at making the Duster the perfect outdoor adventure enabler, and I’ll be enlisting as many of them as I can over the next six updates to see if it can help me get my spark back.

The research suggests ten Everyday Adventures for every schedule and budget. The first – “go stargazing in your local park” caught my imagination immediately, because the only requirements are a dark sky, and the ability to look up and go “ooh”.

I’ve spiced it up by borrowing a telescope and driving to the Gower Dark Sky Zone in south Wales, early enough in the year to enjoy an 8pm sunset. This adventure basically planned itself. My wife, who I suspect is also craving some adventure, tellingly required no further information than “we’re going stargazing in the Gower and then camping in my car”.

This involves a very clever bit of kit that turns the back of the Duster into a camper van, which I’ll cover in more detail when we take it camping properly later, but for the sake of foreshadowing here it is now, under our stuff.

It goes in the boot and folds out into a bed, meaning you can rock up to a campsite of your choice, and then thoroughly confuse the owner when you tell them you want to park your car on the flat bit of your pitch so you can sleep in it.

A proper review will follow but my first impressions are that this is a seriously useful bit of kit – it’s super easy to deploy and surprisingly comfortable given the foam is only a few inches thick.

We packed a couple of sleeping bags and pillows into the boot but I reckon you could get away with a duvet, certainly in the warmer months anyway.

As anyone who has had an an-hoc sleep in a car will know, the biggest issue is light streaming in through the windows at 4.30am in the morning.

Thankfully the Duster’s Sleep Kit comes with a set of pop-out blinds that fix to the inside of the windows, and keep all but a tiny bit of light from getting in.

They actually do a really good job, and we got the kind of night’s sleep that you get when you’ve normally got two young children in the house and very few opportunities to have a night away from them. We even saw a few stars through the telescope!

At this point you probably want to know a bit more about the car. It’s a Journey-spec, hybrid-powered model with optional metallic paint. You can get a Duster as cheap as £18,380, but mine is the second most expensive trim and the top engine option, so it’s a bit more, at £26,700. Still pretty reasonable, all things considered.

Journey spec gets a 10-inch touchscreen with sat nav and automatic air conditioning and appears to be the range sweetspot. Top-tier Extreme models get heated seats and the clever modular roof bars, which I’ll come back to later.

The engine range includes a 130hp mild hybrid with either two- or all-wheel drive, and then the 140hp 2WD full hybrid we’ve got here. This promises 55mpg and a 0-62mph time of tenish seconds, and is the only automatic option.

It’s not the same hybrid system I loved so much in the Renault Austral I ran previously, but an older version that requires a bit more thought and careful throttle use to extract the best from. I actually drove this powertrain when it was a concept and it’s very sophisticated and impressive from a technical point of view, so we’ll come back to that in a later update too.

Early impressions are good – I think the car itself looks absolutely superb, with styling that has matured brilliantly over its three generations.

I know that’s largely a matter of opinion and in fairness my dream garage does have a fair few boxy cars in it – things like the Skoda Yeti, Suzuki Jimny, Lada Niva and Ford Bronco.

Sandstone metallic paint certainly helps. To my eyes it looks a bit like Berlin taxi beige, or like I’m trying to blend in with a desert.

The thin LED daytime running lights are the biggest stylistic upgrade and make this generation of Duster look a more handsome and high-tech than previous ones, and combined with the slotted grille, it’s got a whiff of Hummer H4 about it (Google it).

The Action Man theme continues inside – the high floor and low ceiling make for a slightly smaller door opening (if you’re tall like me) so you have to kind of post yourself into it. And the windscreen has a letterbox aspect ratio that also feels a bit cocooned and tank-like.

These things sound like negatives but they’re genuinely not, they set the Duster apart from it’s more run of the mill rivals and add up to an experience that is full of charm and character.

Whether – as with previous generations – that personality overrides some of the car’s shortcomings will be seen as we go on.

I haven’t found as many of those as I was expecting, although the dashboard plastic is a bit shiny in direct sunlight, and it took me a full week to find the volume buttons for the media screen (they’re on top, if you’re interested).

Otherwise it’s been plain sailing. For now at least the Dacia Duster has been as nice to drive as it has to sleep it. And it’s not often I get to say that.

*This survey was carried out by Censuswide, where 2,000 nationally representative UK respondents aged 16+ took part between 04/12/2024 and 06/12/2024.


**Since 2018, for private customers