Peugeot 308 Hybrid 180 2022 UK test drive Car News

The 308’s driving position, with its high instruments, low steering column and reduced steering wheel, still seems curious at first glance – and it hasn’t changed much for this new model generation. You still feel like you have to lock the unnaturally low steering wheel between your knees to see the car’s 10.0-inch digital instrument display above the flattened edge; and even when you do, the slightly squashed shape of the wheel itself means that, when you have a quarter turn lock applied around roundabouts, your view of the instrument screen is anyway blocked. The unfamiliar feel passes over time, of course, but I’m still not sure I’d feel comfortable enough with Peugeot’s i-Cockpit ergonomics to prefer them over a conventional control layout, which the company claims all of its owners do so consistently.

Elsewhere, however, less qualified credit is due. Peugeot presented and finished the interior of the 308 with the familiar material style and flourish that we have come to expect from it in recent years, but also raised a bit what we might call the underlying quality of the cabin of the 308. Even the minor switches and harder-to-reach moldings in the car feel solid and are quite attractive to the touch, while storage space is provided ample and free around the front cabin.

And there’s some major news on the subject of odds and ends storage. This is the first new right-hand-drive Peugeot I remember driving that gets a full-size glove box, as the company has obviously finally figured out how to relocate the left-hand-drive fuse box, which was the cause of the regrettable banishment of so many Groupe PSA driver’s manuals to the passenger-side door bins of history throughout the 1990s and 2000s. It is surely a major achievement for the British motoring press, which complains half-size glove boxes in right-hand-drive Peugeots and Citroëns for decades, if we ever had one.

On the road, the 308 is a fairly nimble, smooth and smooth sedan, even in PHEV form (in which the car weighs 300kg more than when combustion, by the way). If you want the car to be at its dynamic best, I would recommend a 1.2 liter petrol under 1300 kg in the mid-size Allure Premium and on 17-inch wheels, but even the hybrid is livelier and more compound than so many other larger, heavier sedans.