Dacia boss sets his sights on the compact segments

Denis Le Vot, a longtime Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance govt, was tapped in 2020 by Renault Team CEO Luca de Meo to direct the automaker’s newly put together Dacia-Lada company device. De Meo has charged Le Vot with growing Dacia’s model selection from tiny cars to the much more lucrative compact segments, starting with the new Jogger 7-seat household car or truck, and continuing with the Bigster compact SUV — all while holding Dacia’s famously reduced base selling prices. He spoke with Automotive News Europe Information Editor Peter Sigal at Renault’s headquarters outdoors of Paris.

Editor’s notice: This job interview was performed just immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, but prior to the team suspended activities in Russia, where Ladas are created and primarily bought, on March 23.

The Dacia Jogger, accessible with 7 seats, has been acquiring good testimonials from the automotive push. The place are your expectations for it as a new addition to your lineup?

The fact is, I you should not know. Our quest proper now is to enter the C [compact] segment. So far, the Dacia model has been sort of compressed in the Renault Group as possessing the position of the B [small] segment, and we are now the most effective-offering retail brand in Europe, just actively playing in the B phase. But the C section is also major. The TIV [total industry volume] is about 1.5 million.

The Jogger’s starting off selling price is about 15,000 euros, which is incredibly unique from other seven seaters in the phase. So, I imagine there is a wonderful prospective for the auto. With the Jogger, we are addressing people. We have a record there — many individuals have [discontinued Dacia] Dokkers and Lodgys. So, there is opportunity for repeat potential buyers but at the similar time, the Jogger gives some thing new, and we want to seize that. With new emissions and air pollution regulations coming, family members-sizing passenger vans are quite terrible in terms of CO2, and seven-seat crossovers are going to be heavy automobiles as whole-hybrids or plug-in hybrids, and selling prices will maintain going up. That is why the Jogger, with a starting up rate of 15,000 euros, is previously incredibly different from the level of competition.

A single of the key issues for the car marketplace in the last year has been the shortage of semiconductors. Will you be ready to satisfy desire for the Jogger?

Dacia in all probability had a loss of about 100,000 cars and trucks past calendar year from the lack. But at the similar time, our buy portfolio has grown by the similar amount of money. We experienced 37,000 orders on Jan. 1, 2021, and on Jan. 1, 2022, it was much more than 130,000. So we could say that almost everything that we estimate we have shed, in fact we have not dropped. We just have purchasers waiting, though we are not joyful about that. On prime of the lack, we see that vehicles are obtaining far more high priced, with the rates of uncooked supplies heading up, and the much more that comes about, the more people arrive to Dacia.

What is Dacia’s typical shipping and delivery time now?

We even now estimate that the initial half of 2022 will be tricky and that most likely the second half will start to boost, which is to say that suppliers will enhance their creation capacity. On shipping times, we are now in between a few to 4 months, relying on the motor vehicle. Our work now is to make it shorter, simply because even four months is very lengthy.