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).