Duster is coming. Or about the third generation SUV

12th of April

Today, in the current market with a four-year delay, sales of the second-generation Renault Duster crossover have finally begun. The Moscow office of the French automaker organized a press tour to Dagestan, where test drives of the new crossover were arranged for journalists writing on automotive topics. Today, reports about these “pokatushki” flooded the entire domestic automotive press.

And what is interesting is that many of the writing fraternity predict this car to almost return to the leaders of the SUV segment of the current car market, from which it was pushed out by another crossover, the Hyundai Creta.

Today, recently, the second generation of the Renault Duster SUV is just at the very beginning of the conveyor and market life, which will last for several years. Recall that the production of the car is deployed at the Renault Nasha Strana plant in Moscow.

But, as you know, this model has been sold on the European market since September 2017, after it was presented to the general public at the international motor show in Paris, however, under the Romanian brand Dacia.

Since then, to get to recently, the SUV has undergone a number of significant changes, in particular, it has a different engine range. As you may have guessed, in the European market, Duster back in 2019 all naturally aspirated engines are a thing of the past. In our country, the engine range remained almost identical to the first generation Duster, including the 2-liter gasoline engine, probably due to the numerous “requests of the workers.”

In the European market, Duster-2, although it was created on the outdated B0 platform, whose roots go back to the second-generation Renault Clio, and this is already a venerable 23-year-old age. However, the French-Romanian SUV Dacia Duster was able to offer a modern interior for a more demanding European audience, modern equipment (keyless entry, 360 ° cameras, automatic air conditioning with displays in circular controllers, etc.).

However, despite the popularity in the European market, the model needs to be updated. And now the paparazzi have caught Duster in camouflage in the Romanian Carpathians. (see photo) But this is most likely an intermediate option, which will refresh the model a little. But a major update is planned for 2024. This, as we remember, was announced at the presentation of the Renaulution strategic plan.

And that's what our channel managed to find out. The new, third generation Duster will debut and be introduced to the European market in 2024. The well-deserved platform B0 (Global Access), on which the second generation of the model is built, will go down in history for Dacia. It is not known how long the release of the second generation of the popular crossover will last in recent years.

The new third generation Duster will be built on the modern CMF-B platform.

The exterior of the car will echo the off-road vehicle that was shown in sketch form and will be up a notch, the Dacia Bigster. How the third generation Duster will look like can be seen in the illustration at the top of this page.

From a number of other characteristics, it turned out that the third generation will remain five-seater, there will be no Grand Duster. A seven-seat variant will be offered for the older Dacia Bigster model. Four-wheel drive 4×4 will be retained, but not in its current form. The rear wheels will be driven by the hybrid drive's electric motor. So no cardan and mechanical connection of both axles. Surely, Renault Duster-III will not be so revolutionary lately.

And some more features of Duster-III. It will not have a diesel power unit. Instead, the model will be available with a hybrid drive. The interior will be much richer, with soft plastic, a new dashboard design, which can already be seen today in the third generation Dacia Sandero. In general, the crossover will change a lot. It will also be produced in Romania at the Dacia plant.