5 Things I Love About ‘My’ Dacia Duster 4x4 (And A Couple I Don’t)

I’ve now spent just over a month living with my long-termer, a top-spec Dacia Duster 4x4 Extreme. That’s been plenty of time to settle into life with it, so how’s it going? Here’s everything I love about it, plus a couple of things it could do better.

The looks still make me smile

It’s often pointed out with a laboured sigh in car circles that basically every compact SUV and crossover looks identical these days, and… yeah. Fair enough. Not so the Duster, though. Looks, of course, aren’t everything, but the Dacia’s ‘I’m a proper 4x4, really, I promise’ vibe really sets it apart.

Since picking it up, it’s shared street space outside my house with some fairly striking machinery – a Lotus Emira, a slinky red Alfa Giulia Quadrifoglio and, at the time of writing, an eye-piercing Imola Yellow Audi RS4 Edition 25. Somehow, though, none of them have managed to totally steal the show from the Duster, especially in its combo of Cedar Green with Extreme-exclusive copper accents.

It’s easy to live with

There are plenty of small but important details in the Duster that go to show that proper thought has been put into making it as fuss-free to live with as possible. Want to disable the speed limit bongs and lane-keep assist? There’s a big ‘My Safety’ button on the dash that remembers your preferred settings with a double press. Want to engage the cruise control? It’s as simple as a single button press on the steering wheel.

Keyless entry is something that so many more expensive cars don’t get quite right, to the point that I never fully trust it, but in the Dacia, it’s as intuitive as it possibly could be. In a world where lots of the cars we drive require a good 30-odd seconds to get everything set just so, the ability to just get into the Duster and go is such a breath of fresh air.

It does the boring stuff brilliantly

Any fears that the Duster’s budget positioning might hurt its ability as a do-it-all car have been quickly assuaged. Yes, some of the materials inside show their price, but everything feels like it’ll be tough and hard-wearing. I thought it might be tiresome on a motorway run, and while the 4x4’s reasonably underpowered engine means you have to think twice about dicing with BMW X5s and Range Rovers in the outside lane, it sits happily, comfortably and reasonably quietly once you’re up to speed.

Even though you do sometimes need to work that engine hard, it’s been returning decent mid-40s fuel economy without breaking a sweat.

It makes you feel adventurous

Watch an advert for any modern crossover, and if it’s not inexplicably leaping between glassy skyscrapers, it’s probably motoring down a dirt track so its occupants can go mountain biking, or paragliding, or extreme chess-playing or something. The Duster’s guilty of this too, but where it does differ is that you might actually use it for this stuff. Having already discovered that it’s a fairly handy off-roader, I’ve been going out of my way to find fords to splash through and fairly tame green lanes to go down.

My new favourite road sign is the rectangular blue one that says “unsuitable for motor vehicles,” indicating a road that’s legal to drive down but probably isn’t sensible to tackle in your average car. In most cars, it’s a warning; in the Duster, it becomes an invitation.

It’s got character

Outside of the really fast stuff, lots of new cars feel increasingly like white goods. The best thing the Duster does is swerve this. Through a combination of its rugged looks, no-nonsense attitude and broad range of talents, it’s started to slip into my life like a really good, well-made shirt or a faithful dog.

Making cars with traits that give them an indefinable ‘character’ is something Renault’s rather good at right now, from the Alpine A110 to the new R5, and the Duster nails it too. That was the main reason I rated it so highly on the launch last autumn, and it gives me a warm feeling inside to know that the feeling only grows after an extended period with it.

What’s not to like?

It’s safe to say that Dustering has been an overwhelmingly positive experience so far, but there are a couple of annoyances. Chief among them is the manual gearbox – I was quite excited to have this to begin with, and the gearshift itself is perfectly fine. The clutch, though, is so light and lacking in feel that even over a month in, I still regularly come close to stalling and make embarrassingly jerky first-to-second shifts. It’s currently the only gearbox you can get with a 4x4, so it’s worth thinking about before you commit.

The other irritations are more minor. There are times when a smidge more power wouldn’t go amiss, and the little storage tray set into the dash, perfectly sized for phones and wallets, is actually pretty hopeless, because its slippery plastic surface means anything you pop in there will almost immediately fly out when you set off. Nothing that a bit of tape and one of those little rubber mats can’t solve, though.