Peugeot 408
REPORT 5
£34,825 OTR/£36,625 as tested/£458 pcm
WHY IT’S HERE
Is a hatch-coupe-crossover a mashup too far?
DRIVER
Paul Horrell
THESE DAYS MOST CARS COME WITH A LINKED PHONE APP. THEY’RE usually a bit er crap It tends to be a near insurmountable faff to get the car to link to your phone Besides the benefits are marginal
In most you can check the car is locked and sometimes actually lock or unlock You can parp the horn remotely if you’ve lost it in a car park Perhaps remotely read fuel tank level and mileage And sometimes send a destination to the car from your phone that you copypasted off a website or email or text But all in some way short of life changing
I’m not sure the Peugeot’s app can do even those things Despite my roadtesterly compulsion to try it out I haven’t managed I went through the rigmarole of setting up an online account and entering the VIN and setting a password but it kept telling me to try again later I asked Peugeot and it turns out trying again later would have been a waste of time The car doesn’t actually belong to me so the system is set up to prevent unattached users unlocking cars from their phones
During the past four months of using the I’ve pretty much stopped wondering what category of car its bodywork belongs to Whether it’s a crossover or a hatch doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t drive like an ungainly tall car It doesn’t The other day we came out of the front door and my child said “Dad there are two Peugeots ” Someone had parked a Cupra Formentor next to the and the two have pretty much identical silhouettes Yet one’s hyped as a coupecrossover the other as a tall hatch
The Citroen C X is a similar idea though with an agreeably squishy emphasis on comfort There aren’t many more Oddly the reminds me of a BMW Series GT that I once ran Not a good omen for Peugeot as BMW and its customers gave up on that after a single generation