Peugeot 208
Early taste of upcoming supermini
At the first showing of the 208, Peugeot brought along a fast 205 to display alongside the new car. That’s a bold move, given how fondly the old car is remembered. Similarly bold is Peugeot design director Gilles Vidal saying the new 208 looks like a “sexy little hot hatch”, while Peugeot’s new tagline is ‘unboring the future’. None of that is the sort of thing you’d do unless you were confident you were regaining your mojo.
I suppose this is our first chance to find out, with the new 208 and e-208 (neither of them hot versions), albeit in prototype form and only on a short route around a test track in France. There’s more to do before the car’s launch at the end of the year, so no star rating this time. You can find out a lot in a short space of time, though.
Let’s begin with the architecture. The 208 is on the PSA Group’s small modular platform, CMP, which, as you’ll probably know by now, will also sit beneath small Citroëns, DSS and the Vauxhall/opel Corsa. It could be that the new 308, Astra and other mid-size PSA cars will be on it too, but that’s a choice each manufacturer will make themselves. The smaller of PSA’S two platforms has a full battery-electric option; the larger one a plug-in hybrid option that can even give them four-wheel drive.
For superminis, front-drive and full EV it is, then, with both internally
combusted and electric variants looking much the same, bar details. The idea is that electricity is just another form of powertrain: you pick diesel, petrol or EV depending on the driving you’re going to be doing. It’s whatever is most convenient for you, not a philosophy. Sensible.
In the DS 3 Crossback, the only production CMP car we’ve driven so far, it’s hard to see that this has compromised things too much. In some ways, the beauty of a pureev platform is that you can put mechanicals where you want to and thereby maximise interior space, and this misses out on that opportunity.
But PSA’S reckoning makes sense if you’re in the business of making mass-volume cars: if you want to keep your manufacturing options flexible, putting all your drivetrains on the same architecture means different versions roll down the same production line in quantities relative to the amount people want them.
As is the way of things, then, the engine sits at the front and drives the front wheels, with struts up there and a torsion beam at the rear. You’ll be able to choose from 75bhp, 99bhp and 128bhp 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrols, a 1.5-litre 99bhp diesel and a 134bhp battery-electric car, whose mechanicals take up the underbonnet space and in which we also had a drive (see overleaf).
Inside, though, one all-new
Peugeot 208 is much like another, which is no bad thing either, given that they look really very good. The design is slick, material choice is strong and perceived quality is high. The door tops are solid rather than squidgy, but beyond that you won’t find much here that’s better on any other car in the class, albeit that the touchscreen, while nicely presented, is less intuitive than the best alternatives, and there’s no reason the heating controls should be on it.
Peugeot’s i-cockpit features again, meaning a small steering wheel that needs to be set fairly low so you can see the dials over it, but here it doesn’t seem – for me and a couple of colleagues – that the wheel obscures the dials as it did on earlier models. An update to it incorporates a 3D element, a kind of head-up display in front of the main dials. Slightly complicated to explain but quite attractive and effective, and standard on Allure-grade models and above (the range is Active, Allure, GT Line for what they call ‘thermal’ models, while the EV comes in GT only).
We tried 99bhp six-speed manual and 128bhp eight-speed automatic petrol versions. Both engines spin freely and quietly, with a little lag at low revs but decent gearshifts: tight if rubbery in the manual, mostly imperceptible in the auto.
For all the talk of dynamics and being fun to drive, though, the driving experience is less impressive than the 208’s interior. It’s good – the ride is reasonably well controlled (the manual thuds less than the heavier auto) and the steering direct, so there’s a relatively agile feel to it, although the lighter car is again better – but the initial roll rate is loose and the steering is over-light, short on self-centring and a touch gloopy. Peugeot’s engineers say they’re aware and still tweaking it.
Hard to tell for sure without a backto-back test on the same roads, but I’d think a Seat Ibiza is more agile (if more brittle) and a Ford Fiesta more fluent all round. Once development is finished we’ll know by just how much the mojo has returned, but for now it’s evident it’s on its way back.
Both engines spin freely and quietly, with little lag at low revs
TESTER’S NOTE There’s still scope for interior fit and finish improvement, but already the 208 feels totally ready in this respect. MP