Dacia Hipster concept may preview new micro electric car
Well, this is a bit of a surprise. This is Dacia’s latest concept car. Dacia, not a company known for its concept cars in huge volume. But this, as you can see down here, is the hipster. And no, it doesn’t run on sourdough and match. It actually runs on electricity. And it’s an idea of what an ultra compact car could be for the Dacia brand. And when I say ultra compact, I mean it’s almost not a car. If you want to kind of think of this conceptually, it sort of sits between what a Citroen Ammy is and what a Dacia spring is. So, it’s not quite the basic you don’t need a license quadricycle thing of an Ammy, but it’s also not a fulls size car. Actually, what it is is about 3 m long. It’s very close, in fact, in size to the original 1959 Mini. It’s really not far off. And yes, like that original 59 Mini, it will genuinely seat four people. This is a surprisingly spacious car. It’s meant to be boxy. It’s meant to be flatsided. You’ve got cool things like sliding side windows almost like an original Renault 4. And all of that has been done to carve out extra space on the interior. So, because that window doesn’t need to wind down, it means there’s actually an armrest inside the edge of the door. an armrest that doubles up as a backpack, incidentally, which is quite a neat touch. And if you’re looking around for the door handles, you’re not going to find them because they are actually strips of fabric. As you can see here on the interior, Dacia has gone ultra ultra minimalist. There’s that backpack door armrest. You can see all this starkle material here inside the door. This is recycled plastic, which Dassi is going very heavy on trying to cut its carbon footprint. The front seat forms a bench. That passenger side one tips forward so you can get in and out of the back. You’ve got UCIP settings all over the dashboard so you can add on accessories. There’s a phone style instrument display there and also a clip for your own mobile phone which becomes essentially the car’s touchcreen and allows you access to the infotainment system. All very minimalist, all very clever. all with items doing double duty, cutting down the number of components, reducing the amount of stuff that has to be built. So, as you can see, once the tailgate is actually open, we’ve got a glass upper panel here and a solid lower panel here. It’s a split tailgate, almost like a micro Range Rover. You can see that these LED brake lights and indicators are actually uncovered. The the glass panel here is the light cover. Now, that’s a 70 L boot as it sits, but this folds down. The cushion flips up and these nifty little headrests hinge sideways into the side glass and then you’ve got 500 L of boot space. Dacia claims it’s big enough to take a washing machine. That’s not bad for a car that only weighs around 800 kilos, possibly even slightly less. Now, we’ve been told that this lower part of the tailgate won’t take any weight yet, so I won’t try sitting on it. Hopefully, if a production version is ever forthcoming, that would make quite a nice picnic seat, wouldn’t it? It is just a really, really cool piece of design. It’s chunky and it’s interesting. It isn’t meant for production yet. Now, we’ve been talking to the Dacia guys this morning. There are vague hints that something like this might be in the offing. Possibly something to conform with the EU’s incoming new small car regulations, which will be essentially like almost like anyway the Japanese K car regulations. If those regulations come in as expected, then this might very well go into production in something of a similar form. It is of course electric. Uh it’s built around the idea of roughly 150 kilometer range, although there’s no real production or performance figures for it yet because it is still just a concept. But in terms of concepts, it’s a pretty cool one.
The Hipster is Dacia’s latest concept car, and it’s a rolling, working idea of what a micro-sized new Dacia could be. Electric, and with a theoretical 150km range, the Hipster has been designed to be minimalist in every sense, and is aimed – if it ever goes on sale – at families looking for a cheap runabout as a second car, young drivers looking for an affordable first set of wheels, and older couples wanting to downsize both in terms of cost and physical bulk.
Read more here: https://www.completecar.ie/car-news/article/14419/Dacia-Hipster-concept-may-preview-new-micro-electric-car
