The original plan for this feature was to meet David Durand a few miles west of Paris for a chatty trudge through some leafy woodland, before settling down next to an idyllic babbling brook for a light lunch and some snaps of us basking cheerily in the sun.
No dice. If we’re to really find out what makes Dacia’s design boss tick and dig deep into his vision for the brand, we need to aim higher. About 1830 metres higher, in fact, as he jovially remarks when he greets us halfway up a frigid, snow-covered Alpine pass overlooking Lake Annecy in the French Alps.
We’ve come to join the passionate outdoorsman for a relaxing couple of days in what he calls the “fresh air” (we’d call it bracing) so he can show us the sorts of environments and pursuits that have inspired his repositioning of Dacia as a maker of lifestyle-flavoured, activity-focused family cars that major on utility but without compromising a jot on ‘cool factor’.
It’s a theme that’s tricky to fully explore in the confines of a motor show hall or a gently heated design studio, so he’s invited us to the mountains he grew up on to demonstrate what it’s all about.
“For me, this is the perfect place,” says the keen sailor, cyclist, runner, climber and skier – not just for showing off the Dacia brand ethos but also because of the connection he has with the area. “It’s not the only place we could go, but for me it comes to my mind immediately because I’m from here. These are my roots,” he says.
Grenoble-born Durand is a Renault Group lifer. Joining the firm fresh out of college 29 years ago as an exterior designer, he made a name for himself with the rule-bending Koleos concept at the turn of the millennium and the wacky Ellypse, which previewed the Modus, two years later.
A subsequent stint in Renault’s satellite studio network included spending time with the design teams in Barcelona, Seoul and São Paulo, before he returned to base to take a leading role in shaping and positioning the Dacia brand.
As exterior design director in 2020, Durand shaped the Bigster concept, which previewed a chunky new 4×4-flavoured direction for the wider line-up and he’s been evolving that since becoming overall design boss four years ago, emphasising the brand’s no-nonsense approach by cultivating a rugged, outdoorsy image centred on the straightforward, intuitive practicality credentials of the cars themselves.
It was a dramatic shift for a brand that had hitherto been known, and celebrated, almost exclusively for its budget-friendly billing, with its cheapest models marked out by diddy steel wheels, black plastic bumpers and blanked-off centre consoles – and Durand says the revamp was a crucial component of former group CEO Luca de Meo’s transformative ‘Renaulution’ reinvention strategy.
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