What's the news?
Good news! If you were ever thinking of buying a Dacia Duster and what stopped you was that it was insufficiently brown, then Dacia has just answered your prayers. The new Duster Essential is very, very brown - in fact it will only come in this rather fetching new Chestnut Brown shade. Standard equipment will include nice new alloys, body colour bumpers, USB connection for the stereo, Bluetooth, electric front windows and central locking. The Duster Essential kicks off a whole lineup of new Essential-badged models which will cover the rest of the Dacia range. Dacia says that they'll be "competitively-priced." We can only hope that they'll be as brown.
The Essential range will be launched at the Geneva Motor Show this week, alongside Dacia's new automatic gearbox option for its diesel engines. The new Easy-R gearbox is a six-speed unit that Dacia says saves fuel because it's based on electro-mechanical principles rather than hydraulic ones. The company also points out that it can creep forward in traffic and hold the car steady on inclines, because of course no other automatic transmission in history has ever been able to do that... The gearbox will be available on diesel versions of the Sandero, Stepway and Logan, but it's not coming to Ireland for the moment.