When Ionuț Melenciuc drove his new Dacia Spring off the lot last month, he paid just £11,990 — making it the cheapest car you can buy in the whole United Kingdom. And it's fully electric. "I was skeptical at first," the 34-year-old warehouse worker from Coventry told Meridia. "But honestly? The savings on fuel alone make it worth it."
The Dacia Spring EV, produced by the Romanian car company owned by Renault, has achieved something that would have seemed impossible a decade ago: the most affordable car in Britain now runs on batteries, not petrol. Just this year, electric vehicles hit a historic milestone in the UK — for the first time ever, they outsold traditional petrol cars. In the first quarter of 2026, plugins captured 35% of all UK car sales, with fully electric models making up 22% of that figure.
Part of the reason for this shift is simply that affordable options finally exist. The second-cheapest car is also electric: the Leapmotor T03, which starts at £12,995. Before Dacia dropped its price, Leapmotor briefly held the top spot for about 24 hours. Both the entry-level Dacia Spring Expression 70 and the higher-trim Spring Extreme 100 offer 140 miles of driving range per charge, while the Leapmotor T03 squeezes out 165 miles. For someone who just needs a car for city commutes and weekly grocery runs, that's plenty.
The numbers reveal a quiet revolution. The cheapest petrol car still available in the UK — the Dacia Sandero — costs £14,765. That's nearly £3,000 more than the cheapest electric option. And running costs tell an even starker story: charging an electric car typically costs a fraction of filling up a petrol tank, especially with home charging overnight.
"How can you compete when you cost more to buy and more to operate?" asked one analyst at Autocar, the long-running British car magazine. "And the driving experience is significantly worse." That question hangs over the entire petrol car industry as electric vehicle technology costs continue to fall.
Of course, these budget models come with trade-offs. The basic Dacia Spring is sparsely equipped — no touchscreen, manual windows, no reversing camera. Step up to the Spring Extreme 100 at £12,990, and you get a 10.1-inch touchscreen, smartphone mirroring, electric rear windows, and that backup camera. The Leapmotor T03 also includes a 10.1-inch center screen but lacks the phone-mirroring feature. The high-end Spring also delivers more zip, with 100 kW of power compared to 70 kW in the standard models.
But for drivers like Melenciuc, who mostly weaves through Coventry's roundabouts and parked cars, the basics are enough. "It's small, it's cheap, and it gets me where I need to go," he said. "What else do you need?"
As battery costs drop and more affordable models roll onto UK roads, analysts expect electric vehicles to keep climbing. The era of the cheap petrol car, it seems, may already be drawing to a close.