Dacia Duster – Reliability & safety

Despite having considerably more advanced safety tech than its predecessor, the Mk3 Dacia Duster received a disappointing three-star safety rating (out of five) from industry 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 for instance, the Duster doesn’t have a safe exit warning system, which alerts occupants of vehicles approaching when someone goes to open the door.

On the positive side, the Duster was praised for having a strong passenger compartment, however 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.

But like we mentioned, there are more safety features on the Dacia Duster than ever before to help prevent you from getting into a collision in the first place. Among them are 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. 

Many drivers, including us sometimes, can find these systems either overly eager or just generally annoying. The Duster’s solution is the ‘My Safety’ button on the dashboard, which drivers just have to press twice, and they activate a personalised mode for the ADAS suite. 

The new Duster hasn’t been in the hands of owners long enough feature in our Driver Power satisfaction survey, although the previous generation came first in our 2024 results list of the best cars to own, so we hope that the latest version will continue this trend. Dacia is also steadily climbing the best manufacturer rankings, and managed to finish in 22nd place out of 32 brands, compared with 26th out of 32 in the previous year. 

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 Duster Hybrid is also 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.