With our long-term test Peugeot 3008 scheduled to be returned to its mother ship shortly I was tasked to take it on one last long road trip – my annual festive-season Pretoria to Cape Town and back marathon.
To be honest I can’t say I enjoyed the journey, but that had nothing to do with the Peugeot which performed admirably.
The problem is that the road-safety authorities were under such pressure to reduce the festive-season fatalities that traffic officials in every dorp and every city on every major highway in South Africa were armed to the teeth with the latest in speed-trapping equipment.
In addition, every 60km/h zone in every dorp and city on every highway seems to have miraculously grown a static speed-trap camera during the last twelve months or so.
So, come the Xmas holidays, it’s open season on the motorists of this country and the boys in blue (or khaki) are happy to sit from sunrise to sunset aiming their new toys at passing cars while building up their annual bonus bonanzas.
TURBINE SMOOTH
Trying to keep to the speed limits in a quiet and turbine-smooth car like the 3008 was a stressful battle. Already Peugeot SA tells me there are tickets speeding (ha ha) their way to me. Ironically, I’m generally considered the slowest and most cautious driver in our motoring department.
I hadn’t driven this Pug before my trip to Cape Town so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The car is classified as an MPV/crossover, although I’ve never quite worked out exactly what a crossover is. Technically, the car isn’t a true MPV because it only has four seats and a proper-sized boot. In reality, despite its shape, it works more like a station wagon than anything else.
CRAMPED IN THE BACK
What also surprised me was how little leg room there was for the back-seat passengers in a car this size. Carrying four adult passengers means that the front-seat occupants need to move quite far forward: not uncomfortably so, but not ideal. Essentially the 3008 would best suit a family with two growing children.
The boot also has a hidden compartment underneath, ideal for those of you who might be planning to go into the drug smuggling or gun running business. And under that is (hoo-bloody-ray!) a full-sized spare wheel and jack, a rather endangered species in European-built cars these days.
Powering our 3008 is a 2-litre turbodiesel engine driving the front wheels through a six-speed automatic gearbox. It has a tiptronic-type sequential manual option but I tried that once and promptly left it in auto for the rest of the journey.
The car also has automatic settings for the aircon, windscreen wipers and headlights, so they too were permanently switched on to the auto option.
SWEET DIESEL, SUPPLE RIDE
Now if there’s two things the French carmakers do well it’s building sweet turbodiesel engines and providing supple, comfortable rides and the 3008 is a perfect example of this. The engine is beautifully smooth and torquey and at a gentle 2 000rpm (out of a possible 5 000rpm) it’s already purring along at 120km/h, which is why I struggled to rein it in on our speed-limit infested roads.
As for the 60km/h zones, that was a battle I was never going to win. The engine was also impressively economical and I managed about 7.3 litres to every 100 kays during the trip.
Something that initially bothered me was that the large console between the front seats had a hinged padded top that flipped towards me rather than away. That meant that rerieving anything from the hidey-hole needed for me to peer over the side, requiring me to take my eyes off the road. Initially I put it down to the fact that it was designed as a left-hand drive car and that the French hadn’t bothered to change it for other markets.
But then it dawned on me that the French weren’t so daft after all. In most situations there would be a front-seat passenger who could retrieve items, thus allowing the driver to keep his (or her) eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel. Doh!
Talking of front-seat passengers I gave a Zimbabwean friend of mine a lift back to Pretoria from Hermanus. His comment was that the seat was the most comfortable he’d ever experienced in a lifetime of motoring. I can also confirm that the driver’s seat too is supremely comfortable. This is a vehicle that can eat up the miles without punishing the occupants.
THOSE LOOKS...
Dislikes? I hate the horrible front-end styling. It looks like a goldfish that’s swallowed a tea strainer. Hopefully the designers will be a touch more subtle when the time comes for its mid-life restyle. It’s also a big vehicle, so I was glad of the rear parking sensors that would beep furiously whenever I got too close to another car in some of Cape Town’s Mickey Mouse shopping-mall carparks.
At almost R350K for the 2.0 HDI Executive automatic it’s not cheap. But for the family that’s looking for something comfortable, reasonably practical, economical and different you could do a lot worse than take a good look at the 3008. -Pretoria News Motoring