Dacia wants to make small cars great again – all hail the new Hipster Concept

With Europe poised to approve a new ultra-compact class of electric cars, the so-called E-car, taking the EU in line with Japan’s celebrate kei cars, we can expect a lot of downsized visions from the zone’s big manufacturers.

One of the first to break cover comes courtesy of Dacia. The Hipster might not have the kind of name you want to say out loud, but as a conceptual vision of an ultra-practical pocket-sized EV it’s hard to beat. A full four-seater, with a transformable interior capable of lugging large loads, the Hipster is just 3m long.

The pure electric concept makes use of ultra-efficient packaging, pushing each wheel to the extremity of the simple bodywork to maximise the available floorplan. Body panels are unadorned, with a simple curve at the shoulder line that runs the full length of the car, terminating in a chamfered rear end with high-level taillights.

Outside, Dacia’s current rugged design language is very much in evidence, with thick ridged plastic wheelarches – made from Dacia’s own Starkle recycled material - simple dot matrix-style lighting front and rear, along with roof bars that are integrated into the bodywork.

According to Dacia’s Romain Gauvin, the company’s head of Advanced Design and Exterior Design, the Hipster is ‘the most Dacia-esque project that I have ever worked on. It has the same societal impact as the Logan did 20 years ago, and it involves inventing something that does not exist today’. The company is set on reinventing mass-market motoring with a dose of design, and the Hipster is billed as ‘the popular car of tomorrow’.

The design team has pared the automobile back down to bare essentials, after research highlighted that the three most sought-after elements of a car bought for function, not fun or image, are agility, practicality and economy. At only 1.53m high and 1.55m wide, the Hipster is tiny by modern standards (Dacia’s own Bigster SUV is 1.81m wide, not including the wing mirrors).

The concept is also 20 per cent lighter than Dacia’s current compact EV, the Dacia Spring. Lightweight learnings from the company’s earlier Manifesto Concept have been carried forward, all part of a drive to use fewer raw materials, therefore less energy in manufacturing and less energy required to move the car.

Other design considerations included budget (Dacia notes that the ‘average price of new vehicles in Europe rose by 77 per cent between 2010 and 2024’) and range – the smallish battery would only need charging twice a week on an average daily usage of 24 miles.

Inside, special attention has been paid to space and practicality. Despite the car’s size, there’s a substantial glass area, bolstered by a semi-glazed roof. The seats are covered with a semi-transparent mesh fabric to minimize weight and bulk, while the dash doubles up as a useful storage space. Additional accessories and functions can be added to the modular dashboard using Dacia’s ‘YouClip’ system, with 11 different anchor points around the car.

Dacia Hipster, concept only, Dacia.co.uk, Dacia_UK