ON YOUR MARQUES...
The Peugeot 308’s facelift means it deserves to do rather better in the UK than it does, believes Sean O’Grady
Peugeot are puzzled about why their mid-market contender (in the jargon of the industry the “C” sector) is the best seller in France, but limps home in seventh place in Britain, way behind the likes of the Ford Focus, Vauxhall Astra and VW Golf.
The answer, they’ve decided, is perceptions about quality. People in this country think (rightly or wrongly) that French cars generally are unreliable and have electrics and electronics that will let them down. Maybe in France they think the same thing but are too chauvinistic to care; maybe also Peugeot’s reliance on sales of diesel models has let them down during the recent backlash.
Whatever. Peugeot have decided that they want to be regarded as a quality marque among the “generalists”, so not proper premium like Mercedes-Benz or BMW, but ahead of, say, Hyundai and Fiat, and on a par with perhaps Volvo or Toyota. Quite an ambition, though in reality only going back to their market position in the 1970s.
Enter, then, the facelifted Peugeot 308. A few years after its launch, and just like its arch-rival the Golf, it has had a revamp as it enters the middle years of its career. This is much needed. For a start the old 308 didn’t have any of the “driver assistance” aids that are now being demanded by tech-savvy buyers, such as blind spot warning detection or adaptive cruise control – significant steps along the line to driverless technology. There’s also a new bigger (9.7inch) touch screen, which matters a lot to the car’s showroom appeal. On the outside are other cosmetic touches; some smart new alloy wheel designs, which genuinely lift the appearance; a slightly fussier grille design, plus new bumpers and headlamps. Stacking it up against Peugeot’s ambitions to be seen as a higher quality badge, it works well, though not as convincingly as their new 3008 (Car of the Year) and 5008 SUVs, both of which have something of that feeling of substance that Peugeots used to be renowned for (and which made them so popular in Africa).
That’s the more cosmetic stuff. Mechanically the range is virtually the same as it was, but with two substantial exceptions. First there’s a new 1.5 litre diesel engine that promises better fuel economy and refinement, and the signs are that it does indeed deliver on that. Crucially they aim to make the unit’s real world emissions much closer to the “test” ones that have now become so notorious – you recall the VW diesel scandal arose because the engineers designed their cars simply to meet the artificial test conditions, irrespective of what they’d actually do out on real roads. Now the authorities will take diesels out into the real world and have a guideline about how far the real-world performance diverges from the test figures. The new 1.5 unit is expected to do well.