Dacia Duster Journey Hybrid - long-term review

If there’s one thing I appreciate in a car, it’s a bit of clever design. The Dacia Duster isn’t overloaded with fancy tech, but it does have a smart, practical feature called YouClip – a modular mounting system around the car designed to hold various accessories. Dacia offers a few official attachments, like a phone holder and a cupholder, but I had some ideas to take it even further.

Take the YouClip mount positioned to the right of the infotainment screen. It appears to exist solely for the phone mount. But given that our Duster has Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, why would you need to mount your phone there? So you can stare at Google Maps twice? To add to the puzzlement, there doesn’t seem to be any other official YouClip accessories designed for that space. An additional cupholder? Nope, the official Dacia one doesn’t fit there.

This is where 3D-printing comes into play. To test things out, I downloaded the plans for a drinks can holder from Thingiverse (thanks to the designer ‘Maxime’) and set about printing it. Blast, it didn’t quite reach the recessed YouClip mount. But then I found a solution… a YouClip mount extension.

With the mount extension printed, I could finally store a third drink up front, neatly positioned behind the steering wheel for fast hydration. Unnecessary? Maybe. But when your regular cupholders are already full of gubbins, having an extra never hurts.

That success got me thinking, what else could I create? As Top Gear’s head of video, I often need quick access to my camera whilst filming. So instead of stopping at a cupholder, I modified the mount extension into a quick-release camera mount that sits behind the centre console. Now, instead of fumbling around for my camera, I can grab it in seconds. It’s also conveniently located right next to the rear USB C sockets for charging on the move.

The process wasn’t entirely smooth, seeing as my CAD skills are virtually non-existent. But with a drill and a hacksaw, I made it work. It’s not a precision-engineered masterpiece, but it does the job. That’s the beauty of 3D printing, you don’t have to be an expert to experiment. Thanks to open-source designs and a bit of DIY ingenuity, the possibilities are endless.

Now I just need to think of the next YouClip accessory to print. A sunglasses holder? A snack tray for long journeys? Maybe I’ll just keep adding cupholders until I run out of space.

Time to fire up the printer and find out.