Judged relative to its rivals, this is quite a tall and high-waisted car – but, while it offers a big boot (almost 600 litres), five-seater cabin space isn’t so impressive.
Instead, the cabin uses patterned woollen textiles that wrap around the front occupants to make you feel quite snug at the wheel, in front of Peugeot’s latest ‘Panoramic i-Cockpit’ control and display concept, which actually works fairly well, and feels less ergonomically weird than its forebears.
The cabin has real style, and high levels of perceived quality. There’s no chrome – instead lots of appealing fabrics and aluminium trim. It’s also one of the best uses of interior lighting we’ve seen, with the fabrics on the dashboard backlit, and the colours changing depending on which of the Eco, Normal or Sport driving modes is selected. It’s not at all gimmicky and is a key part of the interior’s quality look and feel. The word ‘allure’ is used by Peugeot in every other sentence, to describe both this car particular, and the design-lead era into which the brand now wants to move; and while that’s laying it on a bit thick, it’s not used without some justification.
The infotainment technology is new inside, too, and Peugeot’s i-Cockpit – basically a small steering wheel that can block your view of the driver display if you don’t have the wheel on your lap – has now evolved to what Peugeot calls the Panoramic i-Cockpit. This keeps a small steering wheel, but the displays move to the top of the dashboard and you can see it unobstructed, although shorter drivers might find its high mounting obscures their view of some of the road.
The Panoramic i-Cockpit has a 21in display that seamlessly blends two screens: one for the driver, and a more central touchscreen for infotainment. The way it seems to hover over the dashboard gives it a bit more elegance than the standard ‘iPad on the dash’.
We like the addition of the so-called ‘i-Toggle’ screen lower on the fascia. It’s effectively a display for 10 large icons that work as configurable shortcuts. They partially make up for the lack of physical buttons, as you can set them to engage the heated seats, navigation etc, if you like; or to take you straight to the car’s ADAS system overrides. It’s slightly unfortunate that you can’t program them to put the temperature up and down.
Peugeot says the voice control operation is also clever enough to tell which side of the car the commands are coming from; so from their airy throne, the front passenger will also be able to adjust the likes of their side of the climate control through voice alone.
Up front, the e-3008 is an easy car to get comfortable in, and the seats are great; a good driving position is easy to find. Rear passengers get decent head and leg room, although not as much as in rivals like the Renault Scenic, Skoda Enyaq, Tesla Model Y or Hyundai Ioniq 5.
The boot, at 588 litres, is a big and wide space with a flat floor, with some useful underfloor storage and a variable-height floor.
Infotainment
The multimedia system in the e-3008 is a development of the one in most other Stellantis cars. That means the home screen is widely configurable with various tiles. It takes a bit of setting up when you first get the car but ultimately works quite well. The screen did get quite warm on our test drive, and was slightly laggy at times and prone to freezing.
One significant new feature is a route planning function in the on-board navigation. When you set a destination that is further away than the car’s current predicted range, it will plot a route via various rapid chargers. It supposedly knows when chargers are occupied and can re-route you. You can specify how much charge you want to reserve at your destination as well. It seemed to be quite clever in its selection of rapid chargers, but we’ll need to do a long journey in the UK to test how well it works in practice and whether it can begin to get near to the route planner that has been in Teslas for years.
