Peugeot’s versatile SUV should give Honda and Nissan a run for their money, says Neil Lyndon.
Viewed head-on, the face of the new Peugeot 4007 looks like the victim of a cack-handed operation in plastic surgery.
The bottom half is a heavy-chinned bruiser: the top is a delicate slant-eyed beauty. If this car had been human, you might imagine that God had taken his eye off the job on the celestial assembly line and mixed up Kate Moss’s cranium with Mike Tyson’s jaw.
In fact, something quite like this process of assembly did result in the appearance of the 4007. Peugeot and Citro?n, the constituent brands in the French PSA group, combined with Mitsubishi to put this car together and each so-called company is producing its own version from Mitsubishi’s factory in Mizushina, Japan. When it comes off the assembly line as a Mitsubishi, it is called the Outlander. When it acquires a Citro?n face and rear, it is labelled the C-Crosser. Heaven knows what might come out if the workforce got into a party mood and started sticking Outlandish noses on C-Crosser backsides.
Under the appellation 4007, which presumably has a special meaning for its mother, this car is the first four-wheel drive SUV to appear with a Peugeot name. It enters the same corner of the car market as Nissan’s X-Trail and Honda’s C-RV. That sector - composed of versatile middle-sized family cars with a limited measure of off-road capability - is one of the very few in the entire motor vehicle range that is showing consistent growth in demand, not least because those compact SUVs seem (illogically) to be exempt from the fanatical hostility that has blown up around big, luxury 4×4s.
The 4007 will need to be very good to measure up to the excellence of those two market leaders and, as a matter of fact, it comes pretty close in all departments, being capacious, comfortable, easy to get in and out of, pleasing to drive, economical for fuel, environmentally friendly and reasonably priced and offering clever internal design and good visibility. On normal roads and motorways, it rides serenely and drives sharply. Its off-road abilities might not allow it to ford the teeming waters of the Amazon but it’s more than capable of a quiet turn around the park.
Read Article