Peugeot 408
REPORT 6
£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
THE 408 HAS BEEN VANDALISED. A DEEP AND DELIBERATE KEY scratch was wrenched across both doors on the passenger side when parked in a quiet street in Oxford one night My street in London is slightly more grimy and crimey than that one and yet I haven’t had a car vandalised at home for years So this was a bit of a shock
Since then the torch I carry for the has just slightly dimmed I’ve been feeling rather less keen than usual to keep it washed or to look back at it as I walk away This car has very busy external surfaces and an abundance of creases Some places wheelarches sills and bumpers almost seem predented out of the factory Yet even that’s not enough to lead the eye away from the scratches They show up horribly on its sheer flanks It’s an insurance job Too deep for TCut
The is breaking my unbreakable fuel consumption rule I always say all petrol cars do mpg unless they’re big up to mpg or small up to mpg or crossovers up to mpg But the is a little bigger than most and a little taller yet it’s settling at better than mpg And better than on mphandabit motorway
Driving up the M to Milton Keynes there are roadworks and with them like all the arterials into and out of London average speed cameras Here’s a clever little thing I discovered after driving the for a few months The factory satnav knows which roads have those cameras and it calculates and displays your average since the start of the zone
It’s not foolproof though because most zones consist of several subsections and so you might still get a legal starttofinish average but an illegal one in a given subsection So overall I find the adaptive cruise control the best way to keep yourself out of a speed awareness course Well aside from simply concentrating on the task in hand driving