A spry GTi with aninferior interior

...but with such an inferior interior, does this Peugeot 308 really deserve its hot hatch label?

You want to know how the economy is really doing? Talk to your hairdresser. How often the local ladies get their hair cut, coloured and blow-dried is the definitive litmus test of whether things are looking up or grim. You want to know what families and couples are really driving? Here’s what you do. You go to as big a garden centre as you can find on the last Sunday before Christmas, half an hour before it opens, park up and watch the cars roll in.

That’s what I did on December 20 when I ventured out to buy Tash her gardening trolley. (Bullseye, she loved it – phew!)

As I sat there in Buzz, my heroically reliable VW T5 campervan, listening to the radio while also trying to avoid the result of the Strictly final so we could watch it on catch-up that night, I carried out an ad-hoc reality check of what cars were keeping families on the move. By the time the store’s doors finally opened at 10am, there were close to 200 fellow shoppers’ vehicles making up my survey.

There was a Nissan Primera, VW Golf Estate TDI, another T5 (wahey!), a Land Rover Discovery, lots of BMWs and Mercs, a surprising number of Opels, Nissans and Fords (Focus/Fiesta C-Max Zetecs/ Kugas), Nissans, a few Hondas and Toyotas. The coolest car (by miles) was a Subaru Impreza WRX STi Estate, although I did quite like the Proton, and the best bit of cheese was a late Eighties XJ8. But! Only one Peugeot. Car companies are in a spin. Fact. No one really knows what’s going to happen in the future. They have to dare to be different. How daring is Peugeot with its new 308 GTi?

From the outside, not very. Although in a quite stylish, not very kind of way. This car has nice lines. It’s almost sporty but still only on the nice side of sporty. She also has cool fan-tailed lights and intriguingly meaty exhausts. You can order this car with a black rear third on top of whatever colour paint job you go for, like the one pictured here, which is certainly eye-catching but I don’t like.

Inside it’s definitely different. In as much as it is anything but sporty. In fact, it verges on MPV from an atmosphere point of view. The dash disappears off into the distance, as does the windscreen and the rest of the world with it. This kills the whole sporty feel. The fascia is over-minimal, if that’s possible, with a split personality that sees it twist both ways in the middle, fighting to go first towards the passenger and then to the driver. The radio control knob is located in the middle of an otherwise featureless part of the dash, which looks plain wrong. Like an unfinished idea that someone lost confidence in.

When it comes to what the various buttons and switches actually do, the most ‘French’ of them all controls the massage mechanism. There is simply no way that whatever goes on in the small of your back could be described as ‘massage’. It’s more like the seat is heavy breathing, like my dad when he used to nod off on the sofa waiting for Final Score.

When it comes to driving, the front wheels feel like the ones on my kids’ Didicar, a toy that turns pin sharp but leaves the rest of the body to play catch-up; a real sensation of a front-loaded overhang. The gear throw is OK but no more, and quite indistinct through the gate.

The opening and closing of the doors is bizarrely supreme compared to the rest of what’s going on. They just float open in your hand, with the minimal amount of effort required to kiss them shut again. The bonnet, on the other hand, is as ultra-light as the tailgate is heavy – one for Popeye maybe, but not your average mum on the school run.

Another minus is rear legroom, which is almost non-existent considering how much bigger the car looks from the outside than, say, a Golf. However, the seats are mega-comfortable, which they need to be once you’ve dislocated your pelvis trying to sit in them. The sky roof is sky wide and lovely.

Oh, and it’s a good job for the gear knob that the world seems to be heating up at an otherwise irreversible and alarming rate. It’s aluminium, so is freezing cold first thing in the morning and takes at least four junctions to even think about getting any warmer.

There should also be a defibrillator that comes as standard for when you open a door without first applying the handbrake. The alert noise that follows may well plunge those with weak hearts into cardiac arrest.

The steering wheel is too small, and the rev counter mounted on the right reads the opposite way from what most of us are used to. Off-putting, to say the least.

Speaking of off-putting, hold the Sport button down and watch the dash turn from innocent white to a fiendish red. Then again, at least you know you’ve now entered the highest-performance mode

MASSAGE? IT’S MORE LIKE THE SEAT IS HEAVY BREATHING

with which to make the most of the outstanding 272hp from a turbo’d 1.6-litre four-banger? Remember the 1.9-litre 205 GTi of the Nineties? That produced just 130hp!

In short, this is a reasonably wellequipped car, although the boot and the rear passenger room need to renegotiate a little. Good exterior styling, with blistering performance as long as you don’t mind seriously whipping the pony. But is it worthy of wearing the GTi badge?

Not for me. Not quite. I’m afraid I can’t get my head around the interior compromise.