PLUG-IN WAGONS GROUP TEST · FIAT 500 ELECTRIC
Peugeot’s new performance badge debuts not on a hot hatch, but on a hybrid estate that sits most comfortably on a company car list. Can it beat the current fleet champion?
The BMW 330e takes on the, er, Peugeot 508 PSE SW for best fleet honours, the Fiat 500 enters the EV game, plus Defender Commercial
Peugeot versus BMW isn’t a contest you’ll have seen often. That it’s taken the French maker’s most powerful and expensive car to draw the two companies together ought to illustrate the usual gap between their cars. And yet of the pair, passers-by only seem to have eyes for the 508 Peugeot Sport Engineered. Never mind drawing level with BMW in the desirability stakes, Peugeot’s leapfrogged it.
While we don’t comment on the looks of cars too often – you’ve got your own eyes and mind to work out what you think – we’ll just advise not looking at the 508 too closely. It’s a gorgeous device from a few paces away, but some of the finer detail is overwrought, those clumsily decaled winglets sprouting up along its skirts in particular. And is it just us who sees the Monster logo in its “kryptonite claws”? Viewed as a whole, though, it looks the absolute nuts. And at £56k in SW estate form (and costing around £950 per month on a personal lease), so it should. Peugeot keenly acknowledges that outside of the fleet car world, this will be a niche-interest halo car, the one that pulls you into a Peugeot showroom before you whirr out in an electric 208. But with its 13 per cent BIK rate, this petrol-electric 508 PSE could represent an affordable slice of exotica if work’s covering some of the bill.
The BMW 330e is probably peak company car, though. The safe-as-houses 3-Series design and dynamics, with a hybrid powertrain down on the 508’s output but accompanied by a £15k lower RRP and £475 monthly lease costs – half the price if you’re doing this privately – or 11 per cent BIK rate. Mind, spec it up to something approaching the PSE’s equipment levels and you’ll get perilously close on overall price.
The 330e’s set-up is the much easier to digest, a familiar 181bhp 4cyl petrol engine paired up with one 111bhp electric motor to drive the rear axle only (xDrive is a £1,500 option). Its peak power is just a few bhp shy of simply adding engine and e-motor together.
“WHERE THE PEUGEOT TAKES LEARNING, YOU JUST GET IN THE BMW AND INSTINCTIVELY KNOW WHAT TO DO”
Dig beneath the Peugeot’s skin and things are a little more complex, with a 197bhp 4cyl turbo familiar from the 208 GTI and RCZ coupe working with an electric motor on each axle for a combined 355bhp. While those twin e-motors make it four-wheel drive, only as much as 113bhp ever makes it to the rear axle. The car defaults to electric-only on start-up – and RWD – but as soon as the engine chimes in the power spread is front-biased.
Which is just fine, actually. That’s Peugeot’s expertise, and this chunky estate car ends up feeling like a quicker, more tied-down hot hatch when you hustle it. The steering wheel splits opinion but it lends the 508 a boisterousness that’s hard not get drawn in by. It drives like no other 4WD estate.
Above Electric, you have four modes: Comfort, Hybrid, Sport and 4WD. Given the car is fundamentally both hybrid and 4WD, that feels like too much choice. And yet there’s actually not enough: you can’t pair the softest suspension with the sportiest powertrain map. Full power only comes in Sport (other modes limited to 325bhp), but so does a knobbly ride on beaten up roads. The PSE’s suspension sits 4mm lower than a standard 508 while being 50 per cent stiffer and allied to three-mode adjustable damping. The car just never truly settles in anything but the comfiest setting, and neither does its slightly indecisive gearbox. If Peugeot allowed some mix ’n’ match its dynamics might be brilliant enough to overshadow other flaws.
Some interior details are as overwrought as the exterior’s, and the option of six different dial layouts and five different massage functions seems like a distracting cherry atop a disorderly cake. Its button layout feels unfathomable at first, but like an Indonesian jazz-fusion album maybe the lack of convention is what some of the 508’s wantonly ‘different’ buyers actually dig.
You feel fully enveloped by its dark cabin, narrow windows and a wraparound dashboard, giving it a proper performance car feel. The flipside of which is that rear passengers ought not to be over six foot and while the frameless windows bring glamour with surprisingly little impact on refinement, the rear doors’ crudely fixed quarterlight of glass somewhat ruins the effect.
Where the Peugeot takes learning and fathoming out, you just get in the BMW and instinctively know what to do. There’s no bedding-in process.
For all its hybrid tech (again, with a multitude of modes) it’s as effortless to operate as BMWs ever have been, retaining the 3-Series schtick of being wholly conventional to operate while really quite special to drive. It’s a skill few cars truly nail – late Nineties Fords were particularly good at it, too – and it’s rarer than ever as touchscreens and autonomy tighten their grasp.
It all contrives to make the 508 look severely try-hard; in the Beemer the basics are all nailed without fuss. Unlike the Peugeot, you don’t have to engage a different gearbox mode to ask for brake regen. You can click it all across into manual if you want. And for all the PSE’s smart, massaging bucket seats, it’s here where your bum is slammed down closest to the road. And like any stock 3-Series, the 330e offers a fairly vivid illustration of why design discombobulation elsewhere in the BMW range has irked so much, and what a complete direction change such complex styling is from the joyous grace of the company’s core model.
While you can still choose myriad petrol and diesel options, and Peugeot reckons the 508 is actually targeted at the higher performance M340i, this 330e is so deft to drive it’s hard to see how anyone cost-conscious would look elsewhere. Sure, it’s a faintly astonishing 300kg heavier than a 330i, but I think you’d need to experience the two together to truly care.
Hopping into the RWD Touring shows how keeping things traditional often gives us the best driver’s cars. Even beside the Peugeot it hardly rides like a limo, but all told it asks less of its driver while offering them more. And with so much torque waiting to be slung at the rear axle, it’s not only quick, but really quite playful given the chance. Settle down and it does everything else so much more simply, the interior a sea of logic and its boot smaller but a more useful shape than the SW’s.
Compare these cars on any remotely objective or financial level and the 3-Series stands embarrassingly proud of the 508. It’s also the one to go for if you love driving in its purest form (as pure as an automatically shifted hybrid can be, of course). It simply has to win. But if you love cars and their wanton diversity, their advancement, the sheer intrigue and lustre of something new and quirky that means you read this magazine rather than another, the 508 has a heck of a lot of draw. Particularly if it won’t technically be yours.
Put it this way: the classifieds will be rightly littered with ex-business 330es in years to come. It’s such an affordable and difficult to criticise package. But I suspect the comparatively titchy handful of 508 PSE ads will be the ones you WhatsApp (or whatever communication we’re using by then) to your mates, the ones that stand out and you dare each other to take a punt on. I also bet they’ll have been more carefully looked after by more attentive, discerning owners. Wouldn’t you like to say you were someone who took a punt?