Peugeot 508 SW Hybrid 225 Allure
Can this svelte-looking plug-in hybrid compete with the big boys in the big-car class?
ROAD TEST
h, the D-segment. Once, when it was normal for a car maker’s range to consist of five models and having five channels on your television seemed quite the extravagance, the D-segment – large family cars – was the dominant force in UK car ownership.
Model ranges and their respective levels of sophistication were glaringly obvious in this companycar-focused market. The badge on the back might even have included an ‘i’, standing “for ‘important’”, as a driver on a TV documentary said at the time. There were big players – Ford and Vauxhall, predominantly – and a British Touring Car Championship focused entirely around big family saloons (and one Volvo estate). And, absolutely, Peugeot was part of it.
These cars are still around but when manufacturers including Renault, Nissan and Toyota have decided that the segment is not really for them, you can see where we are: in a space into which Audi, BMW and Mercedes-benz have muscled and where mainstream makers are trying to push upwards in terms of price, style and quality to remain relevant and profitable.
Which brings us to the latest Peugeot 508, styled in a department headed by 2019 Autocar design award winner Gilles Vidal. It is a rakish, attractive car that has to do two things: be a competitive everyday estate car and yet take on vehicles with seemingly more alluring badges. Can it do it?
Athe DS 7 and the Vauxhall Grandland X even before the former GM outlet joined the group.
The basics of this mean that it’s a conventional, mostly steel monocoque with a Macpherson strut front suspension arrangement and multi-link at the rear. What differentiates it from other car makers’ platforms, and demarks it from PSA’S small car platform, is the method by which it can be electrified. Small Peugeots will be internally combusted or fully battery-electric. The EMP2 structure is internally combusted or plug-in hybrid.
This is the latter, as suggested by its extravagantly long name – the 508 SW Hybrid 225 E-EAT8 S&S Allure. What that means is that in the front there’s a 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine, mounted transversely and driving the front wheels through an eightspeed automatic gearbox. It makes 178bhp and 184lb ft on its own but is also augmented by a 109bhp electric motor, integrated between engine and gearbox, to provide a nominal total of 222bhp through the front wheels and an unspecified maximum torque owing to the two peaks not arriving at the same time.
On Peugeot’s SUVS, and the upcoming fast Peugeot Sport Engineered variant, there’s an extra electric motor at the back providing four-wheel drive and more vigorous acceleration than is on offer here. This car, though, is meant to provide a better all-electric range – some 31 miles, thanks to an 11.8kwh battery mounted rearward under the f loor.