Start with what the Dacia 1310 is: a 4-door saloon / 5-door estate / 5-door hatchback / 2-door coupe, built from 1979 to 2004, as the oil crises and the first emissions rules rewired the industry. What it meant takes a little longer.
How it came about
The Dacia 1310 is a family of automobiles produced and sold exclusively by Dacia between 1979 and the beginning of 1999, and from 1999 to 2006 jointly by the French manufacturer Renault and its Romanian subsidiary Dacia. In 1979, Dacia presented the 1310 model at the Bucharest Auto Show as the successor of the Dacia 1300.
Together with the Dacia 1300, a total of 2,278,691 units were produced, the last sedan being manufactured on July 21, 2004, and the last pick-up truck in December 2006. In the same year, its successor, the Dacia Logan, was launched. It was produced, like the Dacia 1300, in two body variants, sedan and estate, but was also available in hatchback (Dacia 1320 and Dacia 1325 Liberta, produced between 1988 and 1996), pick-up (the Dacia Pick-Up range, produced between 1975 and 2006), and coupé variants (Sport version, largely handmade in small numbers between 1981 and 1992).
Under the skin
The record carries the shape — a 4-door saloon / 5-door estate / 5-door hatchback / 2-door coupe — and the layout: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The engine, output and weight have not yet reached the open record, and MotorJury does not guess at them.
Family and rivals
In the Dacia line-up the Dacia 1310 has a clear place: it replaced the Dacia 1300; it handed the line to the Dacia Nova / Dacia Logan; the factory was Mioveni, Romania. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Lancia Delta, the Mercedes-Benz G-Class, the Audi Quattro. Its Dacia stablemates include the Dacia 1100 and the Dacia 1210.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Dacia 1310 — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.