How Hip is the new Dacia Hipster?

Dacia has just revealed their hand as to what they considers to be the latest trends and fashion when it comes to the automotive industry. And it’s an interesting sight.

Long gone have the days where the term hipster meant a thirty year old man with a scruffy beard, beanie and lion tattoo, instead Dacia has taken a more literal approach to the word. As defined in the Cambridge Dictionary the term hipster refers to “someone who is aware of and influenced by the most recent ideas and fashions”. And thus, Dacia have named their new car exactly that.

The automotive makers have set out to start from scratch in an attempt to make THE definitive electric car of tomorrow. They have therefore made a four-seater car which looks as if a Nissan Cube was a transformer.

Stripping back the energy and resource demanding systems within their cars, Dacia have dedicated themselves to making smaller, more efficient yet accessible vehicles. They claim that in a world where cars are continuously getting bigger, heavier, more sophisticated and expensive, they want to step back whilst claiming to be able to half the current carbon emissions from current EVs.

Measuring only 3 meters long, 1.53 meters high and 1.55 meters wide, the Dacia Hipster concept car is reported to weigh 20% less than the Dacia Spring, Dacia’s previous eco-car. And this is their ideology, the lighter the car, the less raw materials used, the fewer emissions during the cars production.

On the other hand though, the design of the concept car does however raise some confusion.

In Dacia’s press release regarding the Hipster, they talk about how “In the history of the automotive industry, the most successful popular cars have all been distinguished by innovative design.” But hipster is defined as someone who follows recent ideas and fashions. Doesn’t sound very innovative to me.

Either way, Romain Gauvin, Head of Advanced Design & Exterior Design at Dacia describes the design of the Hipster to be shaped like “A car that can be sketched in three strokes of a pencil.” where the release also describes the car as a “block sitting firmly on four wheels”, now you don’t hear Ferrari describing their cars like that.

Now Dacia are claiming that their design allows for exceptional space given its cubic compact exterior design, with 70 litres of boot space with four passengers, and a whopping 500 litres of boot space with only two. They manage to do this by closely following the exterior cubic shape of the bodywork, which suggests that they have neglected the requirement for crumple zones.

In summary, I can’t fault the idea behind the car, making an affordable and emission friendly, compact vehicle just makes sense to me, and a move away from massive SUVs is one I’ll gladly embrace. I do however feel that the design isn’t as innovative as they claim it to be and the name unfortunately doesn’t represent the ideas the original design team had.

“Hipster” by Julis 96 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.