The Dacia Hipster Concept Is A Cute Little Box With A Big Goal

In a car market defined by the swelling of everything – size, weight, complication, and price – companies like Dacia are ever more vital in providing an antidote. That’s why it’s come up with this concept, which looks a bit like a Land Rover Defender has been smushed together with a Suzuki Hustler kei car. In a good way.

It’s called the Hipster, which presumably means it lives in Hoxton, wears a lot of flannel and hasn’t really been a relevant social construct since about 2013. Either that, or Dacia’s just leaning further into the naming pattern it’s locked onto with the Duster and Bigster. 

The Hipster, says Dacia, is a deliberate response to the embiggening of all things automotive, and has been designed to suit the real-world needs of the average person. The manufacturer has conducted studies which suggest that, in France, 94 per cent of drivers travel under 24 miles a day on average. While range figures haven’t been given, the all-electric Hipster has been designed to cover that ground while only needing to be charged twice a week.

In person, it’s properly tiny, sitting somewhere between A-segment city cars like the Hyundai i10 and quadricycles like the Citroen Ami. In fact, at around three metres long, it’s almost exactly the same length as an original BMC Mini, and it’s only a little wider and taller too. That titchiness helps keep weight down to around 800kg, but like the classic Mini, a lot of thought’s gone into maximising interior space.

That includes pushing the wheels right out to the corners (again, like a Mini), and making the Hipster the most practical shape of all – a box. Dacia says it can comfortably fit four adults, and while the boot space with the rear seats up is a piddly 70 litres, they can fold completely flat with the headrests neatly pivoting off to the sides, providing 500 litres of storage.

Those seats are about as basic as can be, and are almost modern reinterpretations of the ones found in a Citroen 2CV. You get a visible frame with mesh fabric stretched over it, all with a view to saving weight. 

Other weight-saving and cost-cutting measures include eschewing an infotainment screen for a smartphone docking station and an in-built sound system for a portable Bluetooth speaker. It’s even got fabric door pulls, which means it’s exactly like a Porsche 911 Carrera RS. In one very specific way. However, the Hipster also uses fabric straps rather than door handles on the outside too, a surprisingly elegant solution that brings advantages for weight, complexity and aerodynamics. Back on the inside, there are 11 mounting points for Dacia’s modular YouClip accessory system.

All this dedication to minimising the use of raw materials is intended not only to keep weight and cost down, but contribute to the Hipster’s other stated goal: halve the typical lifetime CO2 emissions – those produced in manufacturing as well as usage – of even the cleanest-built EVs available today. Romain Gauvin, Dacia’s advanced design and exterior design boss, calls the Hipster “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.”

Of course, it’s far from the only concept we’ve seen that aims to revive the true ultra-basic ‘people’s car’, but most of them never get past the concept stage, any ambitions killed by the growing difficulty of making a profit on a small, basic car – one of the many factors that’s contributed to cars getting ever bigger, dearer and more complex.

It feels like Dacia, of all companies, could be the one to pull it off, but we’ll have to wait and see. What the Hipster isn’t is a preview of the brand’s upcoming European-built electric city car, due to be revealed next year. Instead, it’s something potentially even more pared-back and attainable, and while the brand says it theoretically has everything lined up for it to go into production, it’s waiting to gauge reaction to the concept before it makes a decision. So, over to you, general public – could you see yourself zipping about in one of these adorable little boxes?