Car Moon

It appears that Renault's low cost brand Dacia is getting ready to expand its reach into yet another segment. After the top of the line Duster soft roader, the Romanian manufacturer is planning a seven seater MPV for next year, at least according to a report from French car journal, L'Automobile.

I don’t know if the word Dacia gives James May that fizzing sensation he often talks about, but the Top Gear host seems pretty fond of the Romanian brand. Same goes for low-budget European buyers who see the Renault-era Dacias as well priced models with affordable maintenance costs. One of the Romanian firm's latest cars, the Duster was even nominated for the 2011 COTY award.

However, the brand's models aren't exactly exciting, even more so when it comes to sheer performance with their mundane, small displacement petrol and diesel engines. But as always, for every problem there's a fix. This man's answer was to ditch the Logan sedan's four-cylinder and throw in a 2.8-liter VR6 Volkswagen engine.

For the time being, Dacia's parent company Renault doesn't seem to have any solid plans to further expand the range of its low-cost Logan subcompact, but that hasn't stopped tuning companies from creating their own unique proposals.

Enter the world of Auto K9, a tuning house based in Romania. The company has just presented its latest creation in the form of a one-off Dacia Logan Convertible study based on the sedan model.

The Renault Group has opened a brand new test facility in Titu, Romania. Built on a 330-hectare site located between the Dacia plant in Pitesti and the Renault Technologie Roumanie (RTR) engineering center in Bucharest, the Titu Technical Center will complement the company's Aubevoye and Lardy test centers in France.

When you think about stretch limos, we sincerely doubt that Dacia is among the brands that come to mind. Still, that hasn't deterred some folks from building one off the Logan MCV, a crossover version of the Renault-Nissan alliance's Romanian low-cost sedan. Details are thin on the project but in the extremely rare case you have nothing else better to do, there's a bunch of computer generated drawings of the interior after the jump.

Four years after the release of the Dacia Logan, the Renault Group released a facelift version of its successful low-cost sedan. Inspired from the 5door Dacia Sandero, the New Logan features a new front grille paired with a redesigned front bumper and larger headlights. Likewise, the sedan’s rear-end features a new bumper, revised tail-lights and a more streamline design for the boot lid. Renault/Dacia’s designers also updated the Logan’s interior that features new door panels and a revised centre console with new controls. -Continued

In terms of chassis upgrades, the front and rear tracks of New Dacia Logan have been widened 7mm either side, which reinforces the roadholding capabilities of the vehicle. On the passive safety front, the 2009 Logan features a new honeycomb structure for the dashboard which reduces the severity of impact to the knees. There are no changes under the hood with the New Logan being offered with the same petrol engines (1.4 75hp, 1.6 90hp and 1.6 16V 105hp) and diesel engines (1.5 dCi 70hp and 1.5 dCi 85hp) as before.