Goodbye
Not just practical, great value and easy to live with, the Dacia seven-seater also has a winning personality.
I’m paid to explain my opinions about cars but frankly I’m at a loss with this one. *SHRUG*. Dunno. It’s a mystery really. For some reason, all those cheap and cheerful Renault and Nis-san parts that Dacia assembled to create the Jogger came to-gether and conjured up some magic. Whatever voodoo is go-ing on, the Jogger – on top of its roomy, family-car practicality – simply has extraordinary char-acter and poise.
A big part of its appeal is the engine: this little 1.0-litre is just enormous fun, pulling strongly and accelerating out of corners with so much vim it’s really hard to believe it’s such a tee-ny-tiny city-car three-pot. This engine deserves to be in a light-weight sports car, not a sev-en-seat family bus.
And the handling: I will nev-er forget driving across a high moorland road for our big sports car test back in the sum-mer, with James Taylor behind me in the Porsche Cayman RS. I knew he could overtake me at any moment, but it felt like I was wringing the Dacia’s neck to genuinely stay ahead, slicing through the corners, balancing the chassis on its tippy-toes, ac-celerator pinned.
The Jogger steering feels so mechanical and uncorrupted, allowing you to place the front wheels exactly where you want them; and the body control is uncanny for such a tall car. When we reached our destina-tion, James said: ‘That looked like you were having more fun than I was!’ And – despite a deficit of almost 400bhp – I think he was right.
This surprisingly entertain-ing aspect to the Jogger is of course backed up by all the dai-ly-dull practical stuff. The boxy body – which I think looks great from the front and the rear but weird from the sides – contains a huge, airy cabin. I only used the full seven seats once, ferrying a load of 10-year-olds around for a party; the rest of the time the back row stayed folded up
