Peugeot 408 Review (2023-present)

What is the Peugeot 408?

The new Peugeot 408 is the French manufacturer’s latest offering in the mid-sized family car class, offering an intriguing blend of crossover, coupe, hatchback and saloon within its black-plastic clad, swooping, fastback design.

Style is one of the Peugeot 408’s key selling points – a big part of the allure that the Peugeot brand considers its trademark characteristic amidst a busy and competitive market. And we wouldn’t disagree; the 408’s sleek, angular, aerodynamic styling, distinctive grille and LED running lights all look striking and give this the intangible benefit of being a bit different to most other alternatives, as does the plastic cladding for the wheel arches and lower body. Mind you, those alternatives include everything from family hatches like the VW Golf and Skoda Octavia, through to stylish small estates like the Vauxhall Astra Estate, and family SUVs like the BMW X1, MG ZS EV, Renault Megane E-Tech and Peugeot’s own 3008. If there is anything that the 408 is most certainly not short of, it’s rivals.

The engine range starts with a 129bhp, three-cylinder 1.2-litre turbocharged petrol, or there are two plug-in hybrids offering either 178bhp and 222bhp, badged the Hybrid 180 and Hybrid 225 respectively. Both use a 1.6-litre, four-cylinder turbocharged petrol mated to a single electric motor that delivers zero-emissions running of between 37 and 42 miles. All Peugeot 408 models come with a standard eight-speed automatic gearbox.

Prices start from around £31,000 for the entry-level 1.2 PureTech, while the plug-in hybrids start at around £39,000, and will attract cheap company car tax thanks to CO2 emissions of between 24 – 30g/km.

How practical is it?

It’s hard to get a handle on how big the Peugeot 408 is; it looks rather big in the pictures, thanks to its pseudo-SUV styling cues and chunky black plastic trim. In reality, at nearly 4.7m long, the Peugeot 408 is a fraction shorter than a BMW 3 Series, although the slightly jacked-up ride height means that it’s noticeably taller at 1.47m to the roof.

So it’s clever that Peugeot has managed to make this feel quite a bit bigger than a 3 Series inside. For rear passengers there’s plenty of legroom even if you’re sat behind a tall driver, even more than you get in the Peugeot 3008, for instance. The trade off is in the headspace, which is a bit limited due to the sweeping roofline and a fairly high-set rear bench, so anybody over six-foot will feel a bit hemmed in and the narrow windows don’t help with that slightly claustrophobic feeling in the back. That dramatically lowering roofline also makes it easy to bash your head if you’re regularly leaning in to wrestle with small children and seatbelts.

Even so, there are air vents, a centre armrest, a couple of cupholders and two USB-C charging inputs as standard in the back, so the kids are likely to be perfectly happy.

Plug-in hybrid models do sacrifice a little luggage space to the battery, but they still get a very respectable 471 litres of boot space plus a bit of underfloor storage for a charging cable and a tyre inflation kit. The 1.2 PureTech has an impressive 536 litres of space. Ultimately, both cars have very broad, long boot floors that’ll easily take a chunky buggy or a couple of bags of golf clubs, and the 60/40 split rear seats can be dropped via a release in the boot. The only downside is that the swooping roofline makes for a shallower boot space than you get with traditional estate or SUV alternatives.

The 408 is a really classy, modern-feeling place for the driver. Our GT test car had optional electrically adjustable seats that also bring a massage function, so we can’t speak for the standard manually-adjustable seats, but these top-spec seats are very comfortable. All the materials feel dense and tactile, too, with the jutting dashboard architecture also mirroring the angular exterior styling very nicely.

Whether you can get comfortable with the small steering wheel is really a question of your own stature and chosen driving position: for every driver that says the small wheel obscures the digital ‘Peugeot i-Cockpit’ dials that are set above the wheel, there’s another that says that they have a clear view of the readout and really enjoy the darty-feeling steering response that the small wheel delivers. In short, make sure that you go and sit in a Peugeot 408 (the same applies to every modern Peugeot) to try out the driving position, as it's fairly unconventional and won’t be for everyone.

What isn’t a case of personal preference is the visibility, which is really quite woeful out of the slim rear windscreen and around the chunky rear three-quarter pillars. It’s worth going for the mid-spec Allure Premium if only to get the newly improved blind spot monitoring system, although every 408 does get a decent reversing camera and rear parking sensors.

What's it like to drive?

Peugeot is pitching the 408 as something of a sporty option amidst its many and varied alternatives, but the BMW 3 Series is still the go-to if properly fun, fluid handling is top of your priority list. But that’s not to say that the Peugeot 408 isn’t fun to drive.

The Hybrid 225 is fast enough to deliver a satisfyingly spirited drive down a favourite road, with the electric motor and petrol engine working together to drive the front-wheel-drive-only 408 to 62mph in 7.8sec. The petrol engine gets quite boomy, mind, and the gearbox is a little clunky as it only wants to downshift in very heavy, flat-out acceleration. As a result, even in Sport mode the 408 flips from feeling relaxed and quiet to being boomy and aggressive, and the only way to get at the more pleasant seven-tenths response from the powertrain is to use the paddles on the steering wheel that let you take control of the gearbox.

Do that, and the 408 feels nicely sorted. The small steering wheel emphasises a slightly too-quick initial steering response, which can make the steering feel a touch nervous at times, but once you’re used to it the 408 swings into corners very tidily, with enough feedback to give you confidence as to how much grip there is to play with. Brake feel is just fine, but there are others with a more easy-to-modulate pedal response. Ultimately, it’s not a car that’s inherently sporty or engaging, but on the right road it can be good fun.

More than that, on the 19-inch alloy wheels of our test car, the suspension is pliant and comfortable over all but the bumpiest of roads, yet keeps the body neatly tied down even in fast direction changes. This, in truth, is the 408’s real star turn; that it manages to be such a comfortable, quiet, consummate cruiser. It’s almost as comfortable as the Citroen C5 X – only sharp-edged potholes or speed bumps thump through the cabin in a way that they don’t in the Citroen – yet the Peugeot turns into corners more sharply and generally disguises its weight a bit better.

Speaking of weight, the plug-in hybrid is quite a bit heavier than the standard 1.2 turbocharged petrol, so if you don’t think that you’ll definitely benefit from the electric running in the PHEV, do consider the much more keenly priced 1.2 PureTech. In our tests it was a perfectly willing performer, particularly if you don't intend driving everywhere with the car fully loaded.

Having said that, the quiet, seamless progress you make in pure electric mode in the 408 Hybrid 225 is really excellent for around-town pottering. You can also save your electric miles for later in the journey, should you want to, or you can simply put the 408 in Hybrid mode and let the car do its thing. Do the latter, and it switches from electric to petrol power sources with a noticeable shiver and thrum from the petrol engine, and a noticeable change in throttle response, but it’s still very easy to ignore what the car’s doing in the background and just enjoy the journey.

Technology and equipment

The infotainment system in the Peugeot 408 is much the same as that in the Peugeot 308, albeit already with some software tweaks, and it’s a huge improvement over the company’s older interfaces. The glossy, 10-inch touchscreen offers sharp, clear graphics and responds quickly, while the configurable, touch-sensitive shortcut ‘drawer’ that sticks out beneath the main touchscreen makes for an easy way to hop between functions. It’s still too easy to accidentally hit one of the shortcuts by accident when you’re using the screen, and it’s annoying that you have to use the screen to change the cabin temperature if you don’t want to take your chances with the voice control. Nonetheless the menu layouts and screen response is now more than good enough that you will find the system generally convenient and logical, even if we’d say that the systems in the Kia Niro and BMW X1, for instance, are better still.

You get wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, Bluetooth and digital radio, while the native Tom-Tom nav software is also easy to use if you need it.

Standard equipment is generous even on the entry-level Allure models, with LED lights at the front and back, 17-inch alloy wheels, reversing camera and sensors, lane-keep assist, cruise control, dual-zone climate control, manual lumbar adjustment for the driver, leatherette upholstery and electrically folding side mirrors.

Allure Premium is still likely to be the most popular of the trim levels, and is also the cheapest model available if you want the Hybrid 225. It adds keyless entry, 19-inch alloy wheels, gloss black exterior highlights, front parking sensors and adaptive cruise control with automatic traffic ‘stop-and-go’ function, blind spot warning and rear cross traffic alert (which tells you if there’s something coming when you’re reversing out onto the road).

GT cars up the style ante with boldly styled alloy wheels, the front grille with body-coloured accents, part-alcantara upholstery, heated steering wheel, ‘adamite green’ contrast stitching, powered tailgate and full matrix LED headlights that will give you high beam illumination without dazzling oncoming traffic. Electric seat adjustment is likely to be a very popular option, not least as you have to add this pricey extra (which is only available on GT cars) to get heated seats. which seems a very un-Peugeot-like way of forcing its customers into a high-spec car to get a feature that most would rightly expect to be standard. The panoramic glass roof is also likely to be a popular option, and you can even add a night vision camera that warns of pedestrians, cyclists and animals that you may have missed in the dark.

How much does it cost to run?

At around £32,000 for the 1.2 PureTech Allure Premium, the 408 really does feel like a lot of car that could well persuade more adventurous buyers out of default family car alternatives such as the VW Golf and Nissan Qashqai.

The plug-in hybrids are a lot more expensive, but they do strike a happy medium between the equivalent prices for a plug-in hybrid Peugeot 308 SW and Peugeot 3008 SUV, and – of course – they promise to be more efficient, too.

The 1.2 PureTech manages CO2 of 136g/km and a WLTP combined mpg of up to 48mpg, while the hybrids manage up to 269mpg, with emissions as low as 26g/km. Just be careful that you will benefit enough from the electric running in the PHEVs to justify the higher price; ignore the misleadingly high official mpg, to an extent, and figure out if you can really do most of your journeys on electric power alone, as it’s only then that you’ll see usefully lower running costs. We’d expect to see around 25- to 35- miles of electric range in the Peugeot 408 PHEVs depending on the conditions and driving style. When the battery power is used up, expect the 1.6 petrol to do more like 35-40mpg, while we’d estimate that the lighter 1.2 PureTech will manage mpg in the 40s provided you’re not in a hurry.

Is it reliable?

The Peugeot 408 gets a three-year, 60,000-mile warranty, which is industry standard but is also beginning to look rather underwhelming given that so many manufacturers – including Kia, Hyundai, Toyota and MG – offer much longer standard warranties. The high voltage battery in the Peugeot is warrantied for 100,000 miles and eight years, as is standard for most EVs.

While the Peugeot 408 is too new to have been surveyed for reliability, the brand overall came a rather disappointing 28th out of 32 brands included in the What Car? 2022 used car reliability survey (which considers reliability of cars up to five years old). However, the Driver Power 2022 survey rates new cars based on owner satisfaction over a variety of factors including the style and usability of the car, dealer customer service as well as reliability, and Peugeot did extremely well, placing fourth out of 29 brands.