Great news everyone! The Dacia Sandero will apparently cost £5,995, or about $9,600 in its cheapest trim level, when it goes on sale in the UK tomorrow.

Full pricing and specs will be released Wednesday, but with the Duster SUV retailing for £8,995 (just under $15,000), the smaller, less prestigious Sandero could conceivably occupy the rock-bottom price point. The Telegraph, claims that the cheap sticker is accompanied by improved interior materials and lots of borrowed switch gear. It would be easy to make jokes about how French quality is an improvement from Romanian quality, but our own Marcello de Vasconcellos drives a Brazilian-spec Logan (the sedan version) and assures us that it’s muito bem inside and out.

The Paris Auto Show is about to kick off tomorrow, and some of the product set to debut has me cursing myself for not maxing out my Visa on a flight and a room at the lovely hotel that’s walking distance from the Porte de Versailles, where the pretty girl with crooked teeth sits patiently at the front desk. And how could I forget the wizened gran-mere hovering over the table at breakfast, replenishing your plate with cheeses and baked goods that one could never hope to find at Publix?

Alas, I am not part of the A-List club that gets driven from the Georges V to the Expo Hall in an S-Class, and so rather than sucking down a Gauloises or getting a glimpse of Carla Bruni (I was blessed with such a privilege in 2010) I’m stuck in North America, having to use my brain rather than just repeating back what my PR minders told me over a glass of Cotes-de-Rhone. 

The same people who are attending the show on the Sponsored Content plan will no doubt be running beautifully shot feature articles on the Jaguar F-Type, the McLaren whateveritscalled and the new Range Rover. I wish I was there to see them all, but I’d probably give them a once over at the show and then wait another 6 months for them to crop up in Forest Hill Village on a Sunday morning.

What I’m really interested in is the low end flotsam that we won’t ever get.Car makers can be put in one of three categories nowadays; low-cost, volume and premium. In Europe, volume car makers are getting pulverized by the godawful economic conditions on the continent. If you’ve read TTAC for longer than a week, you have seen at least one story about this. It’s arguably been the overarching narrative of 2012, and nobody is getting hit harder than European car makers. Peugeot Citroen is closing plants in France, Ford is hemorrhaging money, Opel is shrugging off the hand of the grim reaper.

Premium cars, buoyed by markets outside of Europe, are doing better, but even Mercedes-Benz is predicting falling profits and cutting costs to the tune of 1 billion euro in 2012. The shining star in Europe is the low-cost car, and to me, the Dacia Sandero is the most compelling car at the Paris Auto Show. Aside from its 15 minutes of fame on Top Gear, the Sandero’s story is so complex and politically loaded that even if the car was an irredeemable piece of garbage, it would still be fascinating.

Dacia was bought by Renault in 1999, and in 2004, the Logan was launched as a low-cost world car. Since then, roughly 1.8 million units have been sold, as buyers in emerging markets flocked to the Renault-engineered car that sold at Lada pricepoints. Later on, Dacia has launched the Lodgy minivan and Duster SUV, which have been critical and marketplace successes, with sales up 16 percent this year in an absolutely dreadful European market. In fact, Dacia has been so successful, that they’ve even been accused of cannibalizing sales of their big brother, Renault.

As if that weren’t pouring salt into the wounds of an ailing domestic car industry, Dacia products are now being built in the former colony of Morocco, where workers are paid 13 percent of what a French Renault worker makes.The Moroccan plant is said to be capable of exporting 85 percent of ts 400,000 unit annual capacity, and most of those will end up in Europe. In a country where immigrants from the Maghreb still struggle with their role in French society, this is, to put it mildly, a controversial issue.

Trade unionists and newspaper columnists have cried foul about the low wages and the outsourcing of jobs that have led to the erosion of the French middle class lifestyle. The outsourcing of low-cost vehcle production has led to the demise of good jobs – but the very people who hold them are unwilling or unable to buy a new mainstream car as it is. They want the low-cost Dacia, the one that could never be sold so cheap as long as they are built by workers making 1,800 euro a month and taking 5 weeks paid vacation. The whole situation is an interesting allegory for the decline of the state-subsidized “la belle vie” that has been enjoyed in Post-WWII France.

All that for one little hatchback that is slow, boring looking and will sell for under $10,000. Isn’t that more interesting than an 800 horsepower McLaren? I think so.

Renault’s establishment of a factory in France’s former colony of Morocco has drawn ire from union officials and industry in the sort of election year politicking that wouldn’t be unknown to Americans. The language and culture may be different, but the theme remains the same; good jobs in the manufacturing sector are leaving the country, and they aren’t coming back.

Renault’s Dacia brand is having a good run in world markets, and achieved a bit of notoriety when Top Gear’s James May professed his undying love for the Dacia Sandero compact hatchback. Renault has even gone as far as killing off half of their UK lineup, replacing the missing vehicles with Dacia cars instead.

A factory in Tangiers, Morocco was established to help build the new 7-seater Dacia Lodgy minivan, which will cost half as much as its Renault equivalent, the Scenic. The plant will also build a replacement for the Logan, and will be able to produce as much as 400,000 cars annually. Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn denied that the Lodgy would cannibalize sales of the Scenic, but the plant’s announcement seems to have struck a nerve in France.

Dacia’s are currently built in Romania, an EU member state, where workers earn 450 euro per month. While a French worker in a Renault factory earns about 1,800 euro, employees at the Moroccan plant will only take home ,250 per month. One columnist in French paper Le Dauphiné Libéré noted that Moroccan workers won’t even be able to buy the cars they produce with that wage. But the Tangiers plant is right near a major port, and Morocco, a relatively poor country will benefit from the 6,000 jobs added by the plant alone.

Meanwhile, Europe is in the throes of an economic crisis with the potential to destabilize the entire continent – and France, along with Germany, are doing the most to bring the EU out of its tailspin. France is in an election year, with Socialist leader Francois Hollande making headway against current leader Nicolas Sarkozy. Not surprisingly, union leaders are giving the government (a 15 percent stakeholder in Renault) some merde royale. ”We see this factory as a dangerous development,” said Fabien Gache, head of French labor union CGT. ”These vehicles are basically…[Dacia branded] Scenics and Kangoos,” Gache said. “They’re bound to hit the Renault brand’s market share.” Even a former cabinet minister for Sarkozy has accused Renault of “social dumping in Morocco“.

Renault is estimated to produce 30 percent of its vehicles in its home market of France. Working in a Renault factory and taking advantage of the French welfare state’s generous benefits used to be a ticket to a solid middle class life in France, but the rise of “l’hexagone” (Dacia) in favor of “le diamant” (Renault) represents a symbolic threat to a former way of life that came to be seen as a birthright in not just France but much of Europe. Ghosn went as far as to say that he never even dreamed of building a Dacia factory in Western Europe, as it would be incompatible with the idea of a “low-cost” vehicle. The Dacia Duster is a major success in France, but it could never be built with workers earning 1,800 euro a month and taking 5 weeks paid vacation. Dacia’s market share has risen as Renault’s has fallen – and why wouldn’t it when the economy is in a toilet, and one can buy a Renault-engineered vehicle for half price compared to the “brand name” version?