I Drove Europe’s Cheapest New Electric Car—and Lived to Tell the Tale

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Right now, the cheapest new electric car you can buy in the United States (not counting any '23 Chevy Bolts that haven't sold yet) is the Nissan Leaf, which starts at $24,390 if you buy one that qualifies for all the requirements to get the $3750 federal tax credit.

Things in the EV-buying world are different in Europe, however, where cheap Chinese cars have hit the mainstream. On a recent trip over there, I had the opportunity to drive a Dacia Spring, the Dongfeng Motor Group-built electric crossover. Here's how it went.

The Dacia Spring isn't the cheapest four-wheeled new production EV available in Europe now, but it's the cheapest electron-fueled real car. If you want to make the case that, say, the Renault Twizy, Citroën Ami (both of which I spotted in respectable numbers on the streets of Paris) or Tazzari Zero quadricycles are cars, go ahead, but they are limited by the European Union to a top speed of 45 kph (28 mph).

The relatively short distances and expensive fuel prices of Western Europe make the region well-suited to EVs, though sufficient access to public charging stations remains a problem. I spotted this Renault Kangoo Z.E. 3.3. electric van charging via an extension cord running out a window at the 11th-century Bourglinster Castle in Luxembourg. Hey, at least the castle has electricity!

As the descendant of immigrants to Minnesota from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, I have Luxembourgish citizenship and visit the old country frequently. The Luxembourg-American community is small, and I got to know a fellow Minnesotan who not only reclaimed his nationality but moved to the region of Luxembourg from which his ancestors emigrated. The move wasn't permanent, but he planned to stay for a few years and wanted wheels. The Spring seemed like a good deal.

This is Ben Welter, veteran Twin Cities newspaperman and author of several fascinating books on Minnesota history. He's a serious amateur hockey player and needed transportation to games in the Grand Duchy as well as in France, Belgium, and Germany with all his goalie gear. In the fall of 2022, he got serious about car shopping.

The 2022 Spring wasn't just the cheapest EV available. With Luxembourg's €8000 rebate for a battery-electric vehicle with power of 150 kW or less, it became one of the cheapest new cars available, period. Ben headed over to the dealership in nearby Diekirch and signed on the line which is dotted.

Here is the invoice showing the important price details. The MSRP was €17,429.75, which was $17,715.60 in August 2022 dollars (and about $18,562.29 in February 2024 dollars). Taxes and registration fees made the price €20,692.81, while options and accessories added another €936.92.

The car was delivered in November of 2022; the €8000 government rebate showed up in April of 2023. When the dust had settled, the car cost €13,629 ($13,852 at the time, or $14,170 in today's dollars).

Ben and his wife live in an apartment with a private garage and modern infrastructure, so it was no problem to hook up a Mode 2 charger for fueling the Spring (ordinary wall-outlet power in Western Europe is 230 volts AC, which simplifies matters for EV owners).

Just unplug it and go.

At full charge, the range-o-meter showed 169 kilometers (about 105 miles).

We never got Dacias in the United States (although I've found a couple of Mexican-market Dacias—a Nissan Aprio and a Renault Duster—in Colorado junkyards), so a bit of the Romanian brand's history is in order here. The first Dacias were license-built Renault R8s, assembled in 1968 at a factory that began life as an IAR aircraft-building facility during World War II.

Production of Renault-related vehicles continued after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian Revolution of 1989, and Renault took over the company in 1999. Today, Dacia is the low-priced brand of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance.

The Spring (go here for the Spring's English-language UK site) is based on the Renault City K-ZE, an electric version of the Indian-market Renault Kwid built in China as a joint venture between the Dongfeng Motor Group, Renault, and Nissan. Even after a recent facelift, it's still astonishingly cheap in Europe.

This car is the "Electric 45" version, which sends 44 hp and 92 lb-ft of torque to the front wheels. Dacia lists the French-market 2022 Spring Electric 45's acceleration time to 100 km/h (62 mph) at a sedate 19.1 seconds, though the electric-motor torque makes for decent-enough stoplight launches. Ben says it will cruise happily at 120 km/h (75 mph) but gets much better range at 100 km/h.

The interior is made of cheap materials, and the doors slam with a tinny clang. It's reasonably comfortable inside; my wife, who is a few inches taller than the average Western European woman, didn't feel cramped in the back seat.

There's a dated-looking but functional touchscreen interface. Yes, Chinese is one of the available languages.

There's even factory GPS navigation, which I didn't expect in such a cheap set of wheels.

Ben and his wife live in a city that was a hotbed of anti-Nazi resistance during World War II and was also directly in the line of advance for the Wehrmacht during the Battle of the Bulge.

That means the region took severe punishment during the occupation that began in May 1940, got further beat up when the US Army liberated it in September 1944, and then suffered severe devastation during the Battle of the Bulge. We stopped at a cafe in town that has two old photos hanging on the wall: one showing the neighborhood after the war ended and the other a local racer hooning his Porsche 911 nearby a couple of decades later.

As far as Luxembourgers are concerned, the Holocaust and the Battle of the Bulge are the worst things that have ever happened to their tiny country, and that covers nearly 1110 years of often-grim history and regular invasions from all directions. You'll find memorials to both tragedies wherever you go in the Grand Duchy, with American and British flags marking major Battle of the Bulge sites.

Northern Luxembourg is part of the Ardennes Forest region, which ended up being a convenient invasion superhighway for German forces in 1870, 1914, and 1940. Germany's military was on the ropes in December 1944, but Hitler decided to launch a harebrained attack through Luxembourg and Belgium in the clearly doomed hope of capturing the Allied supply dumps in Antwerp.