The Dacia Hipster is cooler than I’ll ever be – tiny electric four-seater revealed

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word Hipster as meaning “A person who follows the latest trends and fashions in clothing and lifestyle, especially those regarded as being outside the cultural norm.”

Well this is the new Dacia Hipster, and it only lives up to half of its name. It’s certainly something outside of the norm, but Dacia isn’t hoping to follow the latest trends with this car, it wants to set them.

The Hipster is a dinky electric concept car which the budget brand hopes will make electric motoring accessible to more people by stripping away all but the essential features, and creating a huge amount of cabin space in a tiny-weeny little package.

I headed out to Paris in September to take a look around this new car, and there are plenty of quirky features to talk about.

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New Dacia Hipster design – it’s, like, radical dude

You can’t name your car Hipster and then design it to look like a generic, amorphous blob. Skywell already has that base covered with the BE11. Luckily, you’ll certainly turn some heads in this Dacia.

It’s hard to gauge in pictures how big this car is, so here’s a gurning, 6’3” moron standing next to it for scale. At just three metres long and 1.55 metres wide (that’s the car, not me), it’s a whopping 700mm shorter than a Dacia Spring – and that car isn’t exactly a Range Rover.

I love the way this little car looks. It has a kind of pushed-up nose, a bit like a French Bulldog, and that makes it look really cute and approachable. Then from the side it has a baby Land Rover Defender vibe with the squared-off bodywork.

There are a few funky touches as well, like the door handles which are actually fabric straps and the pixel LED rear lights. To keep costs down, only the front fascia and a few small panels can be customised with different colours.

New Dacia Hipster interior – a lesson in simplicity

In keeping with the simple vibe, the Hipster’s interior has been stripped down to the bare essentials. That doesn’t mean the cabin looks like a garden shed though, because there are plenty of clever touches to make it look as trendy as the name would suggest.

The seats are just frames with a fabric mesh stretched over them, but I actually found them to be quite comfy to sit in. This also allows them to be really thin, and it’s see-through which makes it feel really spacious and airy.

Despite being 700mm shorter than a Spring, the Hipster’s rear seats actually feel more spacious. That boxy bodywork allows for decent headroom, and I had decent kneeroom as well.

With all four seats in place, you have a titchy 70-litre boot. You’ll be able to squeeze a weekly shop for two back there, but not much else. Tip the seats forward though and you have a really usable 500 litres of space, and that, according to Dacia, gives you enough room to fit a washing machine back there.

I couldn’t test this in the real world on the launch, but Dacia did set up a VR headset which allowed me to walk around the car in full scale and place a washing machine in the back – so it works in the virtual world at least.

As for the interior itself, you have a small digital driver’s display, a phone mount and a couple of switches. That’s your lot. All of the car’s media functions are controlled through an app on your phone, and music comes courtesy of a Bluetooth speaker attached to one of the 11 YouClip accessory mounts.

YouClip is Dacia’s clever system for adding accessories to your car after you buy it. It’s currently available in the Duster and Bigster as well, but in the Hipster it spans the entire dashboard. You can get cupholders, clipboards and storage pouches to customise the cabin to your needs.

I really like the clever use of materials to brighten up the interior, although I did manage to camouflage myself into the seats with my purple shirt. It sort of gives me Citroen Ami vibes, only much more spacious and a bit more solid-feeling.

New Dacia Hipster – what else do you need to know?

Well first off, the Hipster is just a concept car. It’s not going into production for now, but Dacia didn’t rule out the possibility of building a production version in the future.

You’re probably also wondering how far the Hipster can go on a charge, and while Dacia hasn’t given an official range figure, I can work out a rough number from some of the stats in the press conference.

In France, 94% of motorists travel less than 24 miles per day, and Dacia says the Hipster is designed to offer “sufficient range for daily journeys with the need to recharge just twice a week”. That would suggest a range of 100 miles or less, which tallies with a tiny runaround like this.

Finally, we need to talk about price. How much would a car like this cost? Well, a Dacia Spring starts from £15,000, while the tiny Citroen Ami quadricycle costs £7,700. I would place the Hipster in between these two cars, being bigger and more substantial than an Ami but not quite as refined as a Spring. That means a £10,000 Dacia EV could be on the way in the next few years.

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