► Dacia boss on brand’s varying EuroNCAP star ratings
► ‘Passive’ safety is the focus more than ADAS
► Le Vot points to older cars still being worse in crash safety
Dacia CEO Denis Le Vot has told CAR that the brand ‘is not chasing EuroNCAP stars,’ when questioned about the brand’s crash safety ratings.
The value car brand that’s part of the wider Renault Group has scored mixed results in EuroNCAP crash safety tests over the years, with even its most recent models like the current shape Duster only clocking in a middling three-star rating. The Spring, in pre-facelift form, fared even worse – collecting a one-star rating, with the new one not set to be re-tested until 2027.
Le Vot says that the EuroNCAP stars are ‘the way [of measuring safety] that everyone is using’ when it comes to passive (i.e.: structural and physical crash mitigation) safety. ‘And, if you are a client, you can refer to that as a way to compare the car to others. This is something I respect.’
‘Now though, the weight of the active safety [i.e. the use of technology to help mitigate crashes] that has been gained is complicated to handle,’ says Le Vot. ‘That’s why we have made a choice; we don’t like to take bets on the passive safety, but we make choices on active safety.’ The Spring is the outlier to that point, however, having scored a significantly lower adult and passenger occupant score than every other Dacia tested.
‘We are sorry to see that we got one star on the Jogger, mainly because we did not include a seatbelt reminder on the third row. We can discuss this forever, but it is a choice that we made,’ adds Le Vot. ‘But parents, when they put their child in the third row, would always take care to make sure their seatbelts are on anyway. Adding that feature adds more cost to the car, and more manipulation needed for the seats in the third row. Everything for us comes back to what is essential, and what is not.’
That said, some car buyers are hugely attracted to cars with four and five-star crash ratings and are actively put off by cars that don’t have a high safety rating. ‘There are people who would buy cars because they have five stars, and will spend any amount of money to get that to feel secure. I totally respect that,’ responds Le Vot.
‘But there are so many people who simply cannot afford to buy a new car like that, and would then go and look at a second hand one which these days would be a zero or even a negative-star car,’ he adds. ‘Even if you take a car that is only five years old, it would be a zero-star car now.
‘So, when we put out cars that have three stars now, they still have a very high level of passive safety and it would be a way safer car than the one it will likely replace anyway.’
Le Vot adds that because Dacia is in the game of ‘affordable mobility,’ the cars the brand makes are designed to replace older cars that are worse in terms of emissions, efficiency and safety. ‘When you’re replacing second-hand cars that are six… seven years old with these new ones, that is a good job for the community.’
Jake has been an automotive journalist since 2015, joining CAR as Staff Writer in 2017. With a decade of car news and reviews writing under his belt, he became CAR's Deputy News Editor in 2020 and then News Editor in 2025. Jake's day-to-day role includes co-ordinating CAR's news content across its print, digital and social media channels. When he's not out interviewing an executive, driving a new car for review or on a photoshoot for a CAR feature, he's usually found geeking out on the latest video game, buying yet another pair of wildly-coloured trainers or figuring out where he can put another car-shaped Lego set in his already-full house.
By Jake Groves
CAR's news editor; gamer, trainer freak and serial Lego-ist