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.
The attack and Allied counteroffensive caused more American casualties than any other battle of World War II, in addition to incredible suffering for Luxembourgers and Belgians. General George S. Patton's Third Army broke the German offensive at Bastogne in Belgium, which is where the biggest Bulge museum and memorial now stands. I visited Bastogne in 2019 during my quest in a rented Peugeot 208 for French-language Car-Freshner Little Trees (aka Arbres Magiques).
With Ben living near the place where the German Bulge offensive started and me wanting to experience a proper drive in the Spring while we hung out and traded Luxembourg-Minnesotan tales of journalism (my wife is an Alsace-Wisconsonian journalist, which is close enough), we decided to drive toward Bastogne (which is just on the other side of Luxembourg's western border).
Obviously, the biggest and most sobering memorial to the Battle of the Bulge is the Luxembourg American Cemetery, which is where you'll find the graves of General Patton and 5075 other American soldiers. It's an easy and free bus ride from Luxembourg City, if you're ever in the area. It's not in the area where the Battle of the Bulge itself was fought, however.
For a car with a mere 44 hp (the last new car Americans could buy with under 50 horses—including EVs—was the 49-hp 1993 Geo Metro XFi), the Spring did just fine even on high-speed roads thanks to its decent torque. It's noisy and tinny-feeling at speed, but no worse than the cheap econoboxes we experienced thirty years back. The "ÉNG KÉIER ZE SÉIER, DE LESCHTE BLÉCK" signs ("ONCE TOO FAST, THE LAST LOOK") remind drivers to slow the hell down.
We were headed to Luxembourg's memorial to the sacrifices made by American and British troops as well as those of its own civilians and Resistance fighters, which is near the border town of Pommerloch and within artillery range of Bastogne.
That memorial is the Schumannseck Site Hiking Trail, where the worst fighting of the Bulge took place in December 1944 and January 1945.
The weather was drizzly and just above freezing, though nowhere near as bad as it had been 79 years and two months earlier. The roadside parking was muddy and slimy, but the front-wheel-drive Dacia didn't get stuck.
You need to be very careful when hiking in the Ardennes, because unexploded ordnance from three major wars (Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II) still lurks there. This is an old US Army sign.
Ben and his wife volunteer at the Patton Museum in Ettelbruck, which is full of hardware unearthed in these woods. He says unexploded mines and shells are still found and disposed of in this region at least once each week; further south in Luxembourg, the problem is more likely to be unexploded Allied and German aerial bombs.
Stay on the trail, tourist!
The Schumannseck memorial hiking trail starts at the obliterated ruins of a farmhouse and then takes you past life-size displays made from period photographs shot at the actual locations during the battle. At first, you encounter civilian refugees fleeing the fighting.
Then there are the German and American soldiers, all of whom fought as both attackers and defenders. Naturally, I brought a period-correct European camera, in this case the Paris-made late-1930s MIOM Photax that I used to document Alpine's Pikes Peak effort last summer. These are frozen Wehrmacht troops, preparing for Patton's attack.
And here are the equally frozen GIs. Try to picture everything covered in deep snow, which is a rarity in this part of the world today.
Some of the displays are very mildly colorized, which fits in well with the coloring of the Ardennes in winter.
Ties between Luxembourg and the United States remain very close, thanks to the large Luxembourgish-American influence in the Upper Midwest as well as the great sacrifices made by the American servicemen to liberate the country during World War I and World War II.
If you take a driving tour around the Grand Duchy (you can circumnavigate the entire country on one Tesla Model S charge, which may be why the Luxembourgish flics drive them), you'll find American flags and little memorials to American soldiers everywhere.
At the end of the trail, there's a memorial plaque for all the soldiers who died here, in Luxembourgish, French, German, and English. There, I found a wreath placed by the North Belgium Yeomanry Military Historical Vehicle Collectors Group (which appears to have many nicely restored examples of the Willys MB). You see, even with all the war history thrown in, this article still remains in touch with automotive topics.
After leaving Schumannseck, we stopped in Wiltz for some of the local cuisine.
Then Ben offered to let me take the wheel. The winding, narrow streets of Wiltz were ideal for a small EV with good visibility and easy parking, and we stopped at the Wiltz National Strike Monument.
Yes, yet another grim reminder of the war, in this case a tower built in memory of the 21 Wiltz residents who were executed for leading a strike against the Nazi occupiers (who had annexed Luxembourg as part of Germany, outlawed the Luxembourgish and French languages, and were attempting to draft men to fight on the Russian Front).
I thought the Spring felt much quicker than its power numbers suggested, and the build quality wasn't anywhere near as scary as what I expected from a cheap Chinese car. It felt something like driving an underpowered early-1990s Nissan Sentra, in fact. The range didn't seem to be much affected by temperatures in the 30s.
This car would need at least twice its current level of power to be tolerable in the freeway-centric conditions of the United States (although I manage to daily-drive a vehicle with just 55 horses in Denver), and then there's that one-star safety rating from the Euro NACP. In theory, the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi empire might be able to make an Americanized version of the Spring, but that seems extremely unlikely.
About 40 kilometers into our Spring journey, we stopped at a service station. Not for charging, but for a six-pack of the local beer for me to take home. I was ready to laugh at the Spring before I experienced it in person, but it proved to be a functional Point-A-to-Point-B car with a tempting price tag and not as goofy-looking as, say, the Mitsubishi i-MiEV (which I also liked, despite its slowness and short range).
Will we see a relative of this car on our streets in the near future?
