Price £8,245
MPG 68.9
Top speed 99mph
Remember your first car? Mine was a Renault 5 with foreign plates. Rust spread like impetigo round its battered grille; moss grew in the window seals. It had no heating, no stereo, one windscreen wiper and, towards the end of its short but joyous life in my hands, no starter motor. We had to jump it every time… But it was wheels and freedom and… I don’t think I’ve ever loved a car as much.
I’ve been thinking about first cars this week as I have been driving the Peugeot’s new 108 – a small city car aimed firmly at young people. The car was launched this summer and more than 5,000 have already been sold in the UK, almost all to young people who have never owned a Peugeot before. On average the new owners are seven years younger than the people who bought the outgoing 107. Manufacturers value these customers highly because, as car buyers, we are remarkably loyal. The hope is that if you snare a young driver he or she will stay with you for life, slowly working their way up through the various models in the range. (It doesn’t always work like that – I’ve never owned another Renault!)
With its sharp looks and plush options, including a fully retractable fabric roof, Peugeot’s 108 feels a bit too posh to be aimed solely at youngsters. Learning to rough it with an unreliable rust bucket is an important part of their education. How else are they going to learn an appreciation of the finer aspects of motoring – like not sweating at red lights as you wait for the inevitable stall; the dreadful slow bump of a dying battery.
The 108 is a lot more sophisticated than the popular 107 that it replaces. Ivo Groën, the car’s designer, was set the goal of giving the 108 a more premium and upmarket feel, as well as differentiating it from Citroën’s C1 (which is cute) and Toyota’s Aygo (trendy). All three models share the same underpinnings and virtually identical interiors, so it is only the exterior dressing and the badge that buyers have to choose between. These cross-brand alliances are quite common and the unusual pairings you stumble across in the motoring world would make even a veteran swinger raise their eyebrows: Renault and Nissan; Fiat and Chrysler; BMW and Toyota… it’s all going on.
Groën set about his task by creating a car with a chic “about town” character. At the car’s launch, he explained his thinking: “The 107 had a very cab-forward ‘mono-volume’ silhouette… We wanted to give the 108 more of a nose and the powerful feeling that comes with that. We wanted to reduce the glass and increase the sculpting of the body, and at the same time give it a timeless elegance.” Well, there you are…
The nose he developed is dominated by the same “floating grille” as seen on the 108’s bigger sisters the 208, 2008 and 308 – they do say noses run in families. The grille is flanked by a pair of smart bifocal projector headlights, while round the back the group’s “lion claw” lamps provide another link to the rest of the Peugeot range.
Two engines are available – a 68PS 1-litre three-cylinder or an 82PS 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol. Both are efficient and economy is up to 74.3mpg. But the 107 was cheap to run, too. The big difference here is that the 108 is a pleasure to drive. The three-cylinder engine means it makes a strange “thrum”, but you soon get used to it. I drove more than 200 miles in a day – taking my daughter back to university, which seemed a fitting journey for a car aimed at young people. It handled the motorway brilliantly and was small enough to dance through Bristol’s gridlocked streets and squeeze into a tiny space outside her student digs.
Other than being small, cheap and available in dozens of personalised colour combinations, the most obvious youth-centric aspect of the 108 is its connectivity. In 2005 when the 107 was introduced no one had a smart phone, but, the 108 is all about your phone. A seven-inch touchscreen in the centre of the dash can be linked for all your music, media and maps. It feels like the heart of the car in some ways, as if the 108 is simply a large phone holder. Not so much Motion & Emotion, in Peugeot’s famous tagline, as Motion & Emoticon.
A trip down Lego lane
Lego and cars comes together once again as the new Shell V-Power Lego Collection arrives in petrol stations across the land. The range includes a Ferrari F138, Ferrari 250 GTO and Ferrari F12berlinetta. You may not be able to afford the real thing, but these little racers will only set you back £1.99 when you buy £30 or more of Shell’s performance fuel Shell V-Power Nitro.
Peta Todd in the Wales Rally GB
She may be married Mark Cavendish, one of the world’s fastest men on two wheels, but no Peta Todd is getting closer to the action when she competes as a co-driver in the Wales Rally GB, Britain’s round of the World Rally Championship, which gets underway on Thursday 13 November. Peta will be racing with Tony Jardine. Speaking ahead of her WRC debut, Peta said: “Mark is ultra-successful; we know that, his trophies are all over the house. I’ve decided it’s time to win a few trophies of my own, by taking on my own sporting challenge. Once he knew that I was taking on a navigators role in a rally car at 120mph in the World Rally Championship he was 150% jealous, he has already tried to push me out of the seat. I told him to stick to two wheels!” To experience the action yourself at Wales Rally GB, tickets can be purchased at walesrallygb.com or via the ticket hotline 08448 472251
Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @MartinLove166
