Peugeot 308 SW long-term test: report 4

The car Peugeot 308 SW 1.2 Puretech 130 Allure Premium EAT8 | 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 6724 List price £29,100 Target Price £27,486 Price as tested £29,100 Test economy 43.6mpg Official economy 52.1mpg

17 February 2023 – Touch and go

So far, my Peugeot 308 SW has fulfilled its role as an estate car with ease. The boot has managed to cater for all my needs, from heaving a family’s worth of luggage up and down the country, to being a camera tracking car. But what’s it like up front? You know, as a driver?

Having spent numerous hours and miles travelling around the country in other cars, I’ve enjoyed jumping back into the driving seat of my 308 SW for a calming motorway journey. It’s reasonably quiet on these roads, and despite the odd thump from the suspension, it’s otherwise a settled experience.

There is one caveat, though: my journeys remain calm only if I don’t need to rely on the touchscreen infotainment system too much.

Although the screen is a good size (10.0in) with sharp-looking graphics and built-in TomTom sat-nav, the system takes a long time to boot up when I start the car and can be sluggish to respond to inputs. I also feel that the five customisable 'i-Toggle' shortcut keys below the main infotainment screen are somewhat wasted in the mid-rung Allure Premium trim of my car.

In principle, this set-up is a neat idea. Not only are the icons big, but the slim touch panel they're on sticks out slightly from the rest of the dashboard, making them easy to aim for. I simply press and hold the icon I want to set and sift through the menus to find the function I’d like to place there.

The trouble is that my car doesn’t come equipped with many functions that I’d find useful to place in these spots. I can see them being more useful if I had heated seats (available as an option only in top-spec GT trim) or a heated steering wheel, for example. The latter is an option on Allure models and above, and it's something I'd definitely go for if I were to have another 308 SW. 

As with the rest of the infotainment system, the animations that are shown as I hop between menus make the process of finding a function feel unnecessarily slow, too. 

Luckily, there is Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to fall back on, enabling me to use Spotify on my phone to take care of music duties and Google Maps for navigating me around. My car also allows me to connect my device wirelessly, with a wireless charging pad to top up my phone battery at the same time.

The rear-view camera that comes as standard has proved to be a useful bit of kit, but there has been the occasional glitch. I have arrived at my destination and pushed the gear selector into reverse, only to find that the flickering image displayed on the infotainment screen is actually of the place I left at the beginning of my journey. 

It appears my 308’s camera system has a better short-term memory than I do.

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