Romania's Dacia 1300 stayed in production, in one form or another, for 35 years
The first Dacia 1300, a licence-built Renault 12, rolled off the line in time for a 1969 national parade. Romanians loved it, and the waiting lists were always long. The same basic car was still being built in 2004, and nearly two million saloons had been made by the time the last one went to a museum.
Dacia takes its name from the ancient region that is now Romania. The company was founded in 1966 at Colibași, now Mioveni, near Pitești, where a wartime plant had been built to make aircraft engines. While tooling for the Renault 12 was prepared, it built the Renault 8 under licence as the Dacia 1100, producing 37,546 of them from 1968 to 1972.
The 1300 soon grew into a whole family: estates, a goods van without rear seats, an ambulance, pick-ups and a rally-friendly two-door Sport inspired by a prototype built at a service station in Brașov. Plusher versions, such as the Renault 20-based Dacia 2000 sold only in dark blue or black, were reserved for Communist Party officials. In Britain the car was marketed as the Dacia Denem under the slogan The Very Acceptable Dacia Denem, but sales were tiny and perhaps ten survive.
After the 1989 revolution a new version was named the Liberta, reflecting the mood of the moment. Vehicle number 2,000,000 left the factory in 1998, and the ageing design still sold well because it cost from about 4,200 euros and parts were easy to find. The last 1300-series cars rolled out on 21 July 2004, one month short of their 35th anniversary, and saloon number 1,979,730 was set aside for the Dacia Museum. The pick-up lasted until 8 December 2006, when Romania's entry into the European Union ended production of the old designs.
In 1999 the Romanian government sold Dacia to Renault. It is now Romania's largest company by revenue and its biggest exporter, accounting for 8% of national exports in 2018, and in 2024 the brand sold 676,340 vehicles.
Source: Automobile Dacia
