Start with what the Dacia 1300 is: a 4-door saloon / 5-door estate with Petrol engine, built from 1969 to 1984, in the decade that gave the world the pony car and the mid-engined supercar. What it meant takes a little longer.
The story
The Dacia 1300 (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈdatʃi.a] ) is a medium-sized family car based on the Renault 12 that was built during the Cold War by Romanian auto maker Dacia. The "1300" stands for the engine displacement. The first Dacia 1300 left the assembly line on 23 August 1969. On 21 July 2004, the last Dacia 1310 (sedan version), number 1 959 730, rolled out the gates of the Mioveni production facility, just one month before its 35th anniversary.
What is underneath
The engine is Petrol engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. On the scales it comes to 930 kg. Drive goes through a 4-speed manual / 5-speed manual. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 2441 mm (saloon & estate) / 2238 mm (coupé). These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Its place in the line
In the Dacia line-up the Dacia 1300 has a clear place: it handed the line to the Dacia 1310; the factory was Mioveni, Romania. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Range Rover Range Rover, the Chevrolet Impala, the Toyota Hilux. Nearby in the Dacia catalogue sit the Dacia 1100 and the Dacia 1210.
Owning one today
MotorJury scores cars on the United States complaint and recall record, and the Dacia 1300 has none: too old, too rare, or never sold there. Its value today is a collector's question, decided by provenance and condition rather than by a class average.