Dacia to reveal more details of new Skoda Octavia rival in February

Dacia will reveal the first official details of its new Skoda Octavia rival in February – and the rugged estate is set to be a petrol-powered, off-road-ready wagon priced at less than £25,000.

The new model, codenamed C-Neo, will arrive later this year and will play a crucial part in Dacia’s expansion into Europe’s most popular car market, the C-segment.

This already accounts for a fifth of the Romanian firm’s sales, following the introduction of the Bigster SUV this year. A third, as-yet-unknown C-segment model will also join the line-up in 2027.

Speaking at the Brussels motor show, Dacia CEO Katrin Adt told Automotive News Europe that more details on the C-Neo will be revealed "within the next month", and sales chief Frank Marotte added that "we want to build on the success we have met with Bigster".

That success – 67,573 sales last year – has inspired confidence within Dacia that the brand can continue to expand within the highly competitive C-segment, Adt previously told Autocar.

“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 this [the C-Neo] 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 C-Neo will look effectively like a stretched and lifted Sandero, taking the form of a high-riding compact estate that's expected to be around 4.6m long.

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.’”

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).