One of the cleverest things about the latest Dacia Duster is that its creators avoided messing it up.

Better than that, they refined and improved it while maintaining its very attractive price (starting from £21,845) and its singular character - a real feat in a car market stuffed with me-too affordable crossovers.

Despite changing the platform, giving it new styling inside and out, hybridising most of the powertrains and killing off the faithful old diesel, they've maintained it as "a paragon of simplicity, practicality and everyday toughness", which is a description we applied to it a couple of generations ago.

Another supreme achievement of the new Dacia broom is to get the styling so right: it's sharp-edged and chunky in a way that sweeps away the stultifying drive-to-schoolness of many cars in this class.

The interior contains similar achievements. The essential shapes match the a-bit-rugged exterior looks so that you don't even mind a generous helping of hard plastics, choosing them to see them as durability personified.

One thing you will especially love about the Duster is its size. It's a shade bigger inside than the Mk2 yet the exterior hasn't grown. What you notice on the move is improved damping and isolation: the new Alliance CMF-B platform that it shares with the Renault Clio and Nissan Juke, among others, helps here.

If you want a 4x4, our choice would be one of the last examples of the manually shifted mild hybrid, which will soon be replaced by a similarly capable automatic hybrid. More poke with front-wheel drive? Go for the 1.8-litre engine linked to Renault's novel self-shifting transmission that includes two electric motors, one to help drive the wheels while the other works as a starter-generator. The powertrain is smooth and feels torquey, even if its acceleration figures (0-62mph in 9.4sec) are nothing special.

The Duster's enticements to buyers will be seen as its low prices, decent standard equipment, practicality and economy. Yet, as with the previous models, Dacia has managed to maintain its singular, almost mystical persona as an intriguing and slightly off beat machine, the 'interesting' choice of someone who knows what matters in cars and what doesn't.

To have maintained such a subtle and elusive quality while changing so much on and under the skin is a mighty achievement.