5 Things I Learned From 6 Months With A Dacia Duster

After six months, there’s no longer a boxy little green 4x4 parked outside my house, and this has made me rather sad. Our little Dacia Duster – or Dusters, technically, given that we spent some time with the front-wheel drive hybrid as well as the 4x4 that topped and tailed our long-term loan – has gone back to Dacia.

When I took delivery of it back in June, the biggest question I had was whether the charms it had laid on during our first acquaintance at last year’s UK launch would wear off after six months of using it for Actual Car Stuff. Would its budget-friendly nature and its modest performance start to grate, or would all the good stuff shine through? I’m pleased to report that it’s the latter. Here are our five biggest takeaways on life with a Duster.

It’s really good at just being a car

This is less daft than it sounds. Lots of modern cars feel like they’ve been designed to be showy tech pieces first, and actual modes of transport second. The Duster is very much the opposite – in the nicest possible way, it feels like a car that was designed 25 years ago.

You get in, press a button twice to forget about your annoying driver-assist systems until next time you drive it, and off you go. Sure, there’s a screen, but nothing’s buried too deeply in it, and you get proper buttons for all the important stuff. (That said, Renault could really do with coming up with a better solution for audio controls than the awkward little stalk mounted on the steering column. It’s been literal decades, guys.)

You don’t need a fancy interior

Yes, Alcantara, fine Connelly leather, massaging seats and exquisitely knurled aluminium switches are all nice, but at no point did I step out of a fancier car that I had on test and into the Duster and think to myself, ‘oh dear, I’ve accidentally ended up in a Victorian workhouse’.

There are lots of hard plastics to be found, but maybe hard plastics aren’t as bad as decades of them being pointed out as a downside in car reviews have led us to believe. I mean, how often are you pawing at your dashboard like a weird dog anyway? The fact is that after six months of fairly hard usage, nothing broke or fell off. It did develop some sort of squeak from somewhere in the boot, though. Never figured out what was causing it.

The 4x4 Hybrid will be worth waiting for

Neither of the Dusters I spent time with were perfect in the powertrain department. I far preferred the 128bhp mild hybrid 4x4, because with its manual gearbox, I could make the most of that relatively modest output, but even then, it could still struggle on long uphill slogs. The 138bhp Hybrid 140 was the nicer thing around town, where it could run largely on electric power, but its often slow-to-react gearbox made higher-speed driving sometimes frustrating. Both absolutely sipped fuel, though – even the less economical 4x4 was comfortably getting MPG in the mid 40s.

The upcoming 148bhp, all-wheel drive Hybrid-G should solve the problems of both powertrains. Not only is it bringing more power to the table, but it’ll also swap the regular front-drive Hybrid’s underwhelming auto for a dual-clutcher, complete with paddles. Sounds like it’ll be the best of both worlds, although it’ll also inevitably be the priciest Duster. It’s also worth noting that the 138bhp Hybrid 140 we tried is no longer available – it’s been superseded by the gruntier 153bhp Hybrid 155. We’re yet to sample that setup in the Duster, but we found it pretty agreeable in the Bigster.

It’s not perfect…

For as much as I liked the Duster, there were a few things that annoyed me. I did get used to the manual 4x4’s super-light clutch pedal, nor its brake pedal that had a tiny bit of dead travel at the top before suddenly remembering it was connected to some brakes. Driving in a thicker-soled pair of trainers, this would occasionally leave me and my passengers doing unwanted recreations of that Bohemian Rhapsody scene in Wayne’s World when all the stopping power suddenly arrived.

There were times, too, when the Apple CarPlay connection was inconsistent, and the touchscreen itself was sometimes slow to respond. The heated steering wheel was a particular bugbear in this regard, often taking several jabs to activate, despite the screen seemingly registering the touch.

There was also the time during a cold snap when it took several attempts to start, briefly chuntering into life before dying out again. You’d expect this with an older car, but not necessarily a brand new one with a strong battery. Then again, this might have been my fault, as it had basically no fuel in it at the time.

…but it gets under your skin

So much about the latest Duster is just undeniably charming. The tough-but-cute Alsatian puppy looks, the fact that the 4x4 always felt ready for an adventure, the fact that it’s seemingly named after a household cleaning implement instead of something meaningless or needlessly aggressive. It just has a sense of fun about it.

But unlike Dusters of old, that sense of fun doesn’t really come with much compromise. Sure, it’s a bit underpowered and your snobbier neighbours might look down on you, but it’s a more complete package than ever. 

Our Duster swallowed everything from big shops to muddy mountain bikes, sat for hours on end on the motorway, held it together on exuberant backroad drives, battered its way down grizzled forest tracks and felt light and manoeuvrable in city centres, and did it all without complaint. You can even sleep in it if you really need to. It really is that rarest of things – a car you can love as an enthusiast, but still recommend to people who just want to buy a car. There's not a lot out there that ticks both of those boxes.