Dacia Striker: new £25k petrol estate to be revealed next week

Dacia has confirmed that its new rugged estate, set to be priced from less than £25,000, will be called the Striker. 

The new model, being unveiled on 10 March, will be crucial for the brand as it expands into Europe's most popular car market, the C-segment.

The segment is considered an open goal for the brand, having successfully launched the Bigster, to which the Striker is closely related. 

The large SUV already accounts for a fifth of the Romanian brand's sales, and a third, as-yet-unknown C-segment model will join the line-up next year.

CEO Katrin Adt previously told Autocar that strong sales of the new Bigster have inspired confidence within Dacia that the brand can continue to expand within the highly competitive sector.

“Our main territory currently is the B-segment, but we have also offerings in the A-segment and we have started in the C-segment, and we did that quite amazingly well with the Bigster,” she said.

"You need to watch out that every car has its own place in the segment – its own purpose – and you can be pretty sure that [the Striker] will be a totally different offer to the customer than the Bigster.”

A leaked photo of what appears to be a late-stage prototype shows that the Striker will look effectively like a stretched and lifted Sandero, taking the form of a high-riding, circa-4.6m-long estate.

Former product performance boss Patrice Lévy-Bencheton said: “There is also a significant share of the C-segment which is non-SUV people, who are still looking for a lower driving position, a more efficient product [that is] less ostentatious. For some, an SUV is a bit ostentatious.”

He added that there is a significant proportion of buyers in this space who want “the performance, the comfort and the pleasure of having a slightly bigger car but who are not attracted by the SUV shape and who think: ‘We have to go for a more efficient product, more elegant.’”

Sales and marketing boss Frank Marotte agreed and said the retirement of the Ford Focus and increasing prices of its contemporaries – such as the Volkswagen Golf, Vauxhall Astra and Toyota Corolla – have opened up an opportunity for Dacia in this segment, where it plans to undercut all major competitors, just as it did with the Bigster (pictured below).

“What we want to do in the C-segment is what we’ve done in the B- or the B- plus,” said Marotte. “We have identified that with the C-SUV particularly. But even the C-hatch is probably a segment where the prices have gone up the most in the last five years. You see the increase in monthly instalment or in prices in that segment: it’s massive.”

Dacia will pursue a similar pricing policy with the Striker, leaving out what the company perceives to be ‘non-essential’ equipment in order to maintain a lower list price than its core rivals.

The Bigster, for example, starts at around £25,000 – £5000 cheaper than the same-sized Nissan Qashqai and £9000 less than the Ford Kuga.

The Striker is likely to come in around the £20,000 mark, commanding a £5000 premium over the smaller Sandero but still being significantly cheaper than the £27k Seat Leon and £29k Skoda Octavia estates.

Being based on the same Renault Group CMF-B platform that Dacia uses for all its models except the Spring EV, it's expected to be all but technically identical to the Bigster, with a choice of mild- and full-hybrid petrol powertrains ranging in output from 128bhp to 153bhp. However, it remains to be seen whether it will follow its SUV siblings and Skoda rival in being offered with four-wheel drive.

Either way, the Striker will stay true to Dacia’s rugged, activity-focused ethos by virtue of its raised suspension and body cladding – a similar treatment to that on the range-topping Sandero Stepway, which design boss David Durand said “is a bit ‘outdoors’ too” despite being front-driven.

He said: “In this case, it’s just ground clearance and high tyres that make you confident to go on a rocky road with no fear – and you use it every day and you [fill] it with anything you want.

“It’s a tool. It’s not an object that you show off in front of your house and that represents your social level. It’s something that you are really using every day, with the kids, with adults. You have big roominess.

"So it’s this slightly different ‘outdoors’ way that we can explore.”