19 Apr 04
'If you just produce a box on wheels, you're dead.' So says Christian Géraud, Peugeot UK's managing director. The point he's making is that people want a fashion car, a car which looks special and says something about its user's taste. Sales of mainstream saloons (such as, let's see... the Peugeot 406) are falling; the only way forward is to create something with some form of excitement and desirability potential.
But fashion is a fragile, fickle and transient thing. 'Maybe we'll move towards a new car every six years, instead of eight years with a facelift at four,' Géraud suggests. Next thing we knew, we were driving Peugeot's new 407.
It could almost be something like a Maserati on first, corner-of-eye encounter. That low, slatted front grille and the streamlined headlamps are pure past supercar, designed visually to lower and render more sleek what is actually quite a bulky nose with an enormous overhang. The style gets more conventional the further back you look, albeit still with a 206/307-style, vertical-edged rear side window, but the 407 is certainly one of the most distinctive-looking 'upper-mediums' of all. And that includes the so-called premium brands, towards which the 407 closes the quality and intrigue gap as the distinctions blur.
The 407 is charged, among other tasks, with resurrecting Peugeot's reputation for cars with the best ride and handling mix of all. The dynamic motif used to be a kind of fluid suppleness over bumps allied to a crisp, responsive feel when steering through bends: a dynamic Holy Grail which Peugeot reached more often than most. That has gone missing a little of late, notably in the 307 whose ride was oddly stiff-kneed at launch and which, though now more absorbent, still lacks that 'roll-along' feeling felt in past Peugeots (even sporty ones).
