Dacia Duster – Reliability & safety
The Dacia Duster received a disappointing three-star rating from Euro NCAP, even though there’s more safety tech than ever before
Unfortunately, the latest Dacia Duster received a disappointing three-stars out of five result from safety experts Euro NCAP. Some of it is down to the brand’s approach to only offering the features that customers want in order to give them the best value for money, so the Duster doesn’t have a warning system for vehicles approaching warning when you go to open the door or a child presence detection system. On the positive side, the Duster was praised for having a strong passenger compartment, but it’s a little worrying that in the frontal impact tests, chest protection for both the driver and passengers seated in the back was only rated as being marginal.
That said, there are more safety features than ever fitted to the latest Duster to help prevent you from getting into a collision in the first place, with automatic emergency braking, traffic sign recognition (which worked perfectly for us), a speed-limit alert, rear-parking assist, lane-departure warning, lane-keep assist (that, again, worked very well), and driver-attention alert. Tellingly, bosses are keen to point out that these features can be turned off at the touch of a button once you’ve configured them to your personal tastes.
Dacia is steadily climbing the manufacturer rankings of the Driver Power customer satisfaction survey. The brand improved upon its 2023 score, finishing in 22nd place out of 32 manufacturers compared with 26th out of 32 in the previous year. The outgoing Duster came first in our 2024 results list of the best cars to own, so we hope that the latest version will continue this trend.
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Key standard safety features |
Euro NCAP safety ratings |
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Warranty
Dacia still offers a standard three-year/60,000-mile warranty for all models, along with free roadside assistance for the same period, but has followed Toyota in offering an extended warranty as part of routine servicing.
If you take your Duster to a Dacia dealer for annual servicing, you get an additional 12 months of cover, or up to 18,000 miles after the standard manufacturer’s warranty has expired. You can repeat this until the car is seven years old or has covered 75,000 miles, which is longer than most manufacturers’ warranties, including for Volkswagen.
The battery in the hybrid system is covered for eight years or 100,000 miles, but the degradation limit of maintaining above 63 per cent capacity over that time is greater than most manufacturers, who guarantee the battery pack won’t drop below 70 per cent.
Servicing
Servicing plans are available to help spread the scheduled maintenance costs. You can get plans of 3 years/30,000 miles, three years/45,000 miles, four years/48,000 miles, or four years/60,000 miles. All plans above the basic three years/30,000 miles come with one free MOT test, and prices range from £13.99 per month up to £23.99 per month.
