Peugeot 308 SW long-term test: report 3
The Peugeot 308 SW is one of the sharpest looking estates around, but does this come at the expense of practicality? We're living with it to find out...
The car Peugeot 308 SW 1.2 Puretech 130 EAT8 Allure Premium | Run by Lawrence Cheung, new cars editor
Why it's here To prove a petrol estate car makes sense in a world heading towards electrified SUVs
Needs to Be practical enough to tackle family and work life, offer a degree of fun and be desirable enough to make you think twice about a trendy SUV
Mileage 6462 List price £29,100 Target Price £27,486 Price as tested £29,100 Test economy 43.4mpg Official economy 52.1mpg
28 January 2023 – Ready, set, action!
My Peugeot 308 SW managed to deal with everything my family threw at it over the New Year holiday, but now it’s back to work and straight into another challenge: Fitting a Kiall.
More specifically, our Senior Videographer Kiall Garrett. He needed to film 10 cars featured in our test of the latest driver assistance systems at a private test track owned by safety experts Thatcham Research.
To do so, he'd have to film from inside the boot of a moving car to get a clean close-up shot of the cars following behind.
The tiny load area of a saloon or a coupé would be disastrous, giving him little space to move around and potentially leaving him unshielded from the outside world. My 308 SW estate car was therefore more than happy to oblige.
The tall load area was big enough for Kiall to harness himself securely in place, and the flat floor meant he didn’t have to rest in an awkward position. And because my car is a ‘regular-height’ estate – in other words, not a high-riding SUV – he could get the low down shots we needed.
Better still, the 308’s comfortable ride meant the gimbal that stabilises his camera didn’t have to work too hard to keep the footage steady as we repeatedly drove up and down the airfield runway.
So how did it go? Well, I genuinely don’t think the chunkier Peugeot 3008 family SUV would have done the job any better. You can see the results for yourself by watching the video of the best driver assistance systems on the What Car? YouTube channel soon.
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