Dacia will reveal the first official details of its new Skoda Octavia rival in February – and the rugged estate is set to be a petrol-powered, off-road-ready wagon priced at less than £25,000.

The new model, codenamed C-Neo, will arrive later this year and will play a crucial part in Dacia’s expansion into Europe’s most popular car market, the C-segment.

This already accounts for a fifth of the Romanian firm’s sales, following the introduction of the Bigster SUV this year. A third, as-yet-unknown C-segment model will also join the line-up in 2027.

Speaking at the Brussels motor show, Dacia CEO Katrin Adt told Automotive News Europe that more details on the C-Neo will be revealed "within the next month", and sales chief Frank Marotte added that "we want to build on the success we have met with Bigster".

That success – 67,573 sales last year – has inspired confidence within Dacia that the brand can continue to expand within the highly competitive C-segment, Adt previously told Autocar.

“Our main territory currently is the B-segment, but we have also offerings in the A-segment and we have started in the C-segment, and we did that quite amazingly well with the Bigster,” she said.

"You need to watch out that every car has its own place in the segment – its own purpose – and you can be pretty sure that this [the C-Neo] will be a totally different offer to the customer than the Bigster.”

A leaked photo of what appears to be a late-stage prototype shows that the C-Neo will look effectively like a stretched and lifted Sandero, taking the form of a high-riding compact estate that's expected to be around 4.6m long.

Product performance boss Patrice Lévy-Bencheton said: “There is also a significant share of the C-segment which is non-SUV people, who are still looking for a lower driving position, a more efficient product [that is] less ostentatious. For some, an SUV is a bit ostentatious.”

He added that there is a significant proportion of buyers in this space who want “the performance, the comfort and the pleasure of having a slightly bigger car but who are not attracted by the SUV shape and who think: ‘We have to go for a more efficient product, more elegant.’”

Marotte agreed and said the retirement of the Ford Focus and increasing prices of its contemporaries – such as the Volkswagen Golf, Vauxhall Astra and Toyota Corolla – have opened up an opportunity for Dacia in this segment, where it plans to undercut all major competitors, just as it did with the Bigster (pictured below).

“What we want to do in the C-segment is what we’ve done in the B- or the B- plus,” said Marotte. “We have identified that with the C-SUV particularly. But even the C-hatch is probably a segment where the prices have gone up the most in the last five years. You see the increase in monthly instalment or in prices in that segment. It’s massive.”

Dacia will pursue a similar pricing policy with the C-Neo, leaving out what the company perceives to be ‘non-essential’ equipment in order to maintain a lower list price than its core rivals.

The Bigster, for example, starts from around £25,000 – £5000 cheaper than the same-sized Nissan Qashqai and £9000 less than the Ford Kuga.

The C-Neo, then, is likely to come in around the £20k mark, commanding a premium over the smaller, £15k Sandero but still being significantly cheaper than the £27k Seat Leon and £29k Octavia estates.

Being based on the same Renault Group CMF-B platform that Dacia uses for all its models except the Spring EV, it's expected to be all but technically identical to the Bigster, with a choice of mild- and full-hybrid petrol powertrains ranging in output from 128bhp to 153bhp – although it remains to be seen if it will follow its SUV siblings – and its Skoda rival – in being offered with four-wheel drive.

Either way, the C-Neo will stay true to Dacia’s ‘rugged’, activity-focused ethos by virtue of its raised suspension and body cladding – a similar treatment to that on the range-topping Sandero Stepway, which design boss David Durand said “is a bit ‘outdoors’ too”, despite being front-driven.

He said: “In this case, it’s just ground clearance and high tyres that make you confident to go on a rocky road with no fear – and you use it every day, and you [fill] it with anything you want.

“It’s a tool. It’s not an object that you show off in front of your house and that represents your social level. It’s something that you are really using every day, with the kids, with adults. You have big roominess. So it’s this slightly different ‘outdoors’ way that we can explore.”