Styling
We're not about to have a big debate about coupe-SUVs and their contentiousness here. We said as much when recently reviewing BMW's (weirdly similar sized) X2 and related
iX2 that if you hate coupe-SUVs on principle, no amount of styling flourishes are going to convince you that you're wrong in your opinion. So what you make of what we're about to say about the E-3008 won't make one jot of difference.
But it's a good-looking thing. It's not stunning, no, and we're not going to be talking about it as a notable waypoint in the evolution of automotive design when we look back on it in years to come, but replacing the striking second-gen 3008 with this confection hasn't turned out to be the aesthetic disaster it might have been. The E-3008 is big, dimensionally about identical to that iX2 we've just mentioned, yet it seems proportional and inoffensive in the metal.
Significant details to note are that Peugeot's 'black bar' detail, which you'll have noticed stretching across the back of products like the 208 and so on, now makes it to the front of the E-3008, separating sleek headlights which sit above a broader radiator 'grille'. Which isn't actually a grille at all on an EV like this, it needs no cooling after all, but you get the point. The triple-strake 'lion claw' light details are all present and correct, front and rear, on the E-3008, while the floating roof spoiler and Kamm-like tail round out the vehicle's overall shape.
Two final features to look at here. Firstly, the 'break point' of the roofline is behind the heads of the Peugeot's rear-seat occupants, which means as much headroom within is preserved; normally, in a coupe, the break point would be ahead of the bonces of anyone sitting in the back, so on a technicality the E-3008 would be more accurately denoted a 'fastback-SUV' than a 'coupe-SUV'. Secondly, those alloys. They're not paying homage to Spiderman fanboys, but are in fact 20-inch items aerodynamically optimised to help the E-3008 reach an overall drag coefficient of 0.28. They're also somewhat fussy in design, which'll make them a bugger to clean, and while they look good all neatly aligned under glittery showroom lights, will they trigger many people's OCD once the car has covered some miles and they're all in different positions due to rotational speed differential? Probably.
Interior
Good news inside: Peugeot has served up another belter in here. It's easily the E-3008's strongest suit, although we are once again dealing with the i-Cockpit ideology of 'tiny steering wheel set down low, visual displays mounted on high' - a set-up not everyone gets on with, depending on how tall (or short) the driver in question is.
The obvious difference here is that the aforementioned displays are now housed in a gargantuan 21-inch widescreen HD display that stretches more than half the width of the main fascia. This will be fitted to every grade of 3008 (yes, there are internal-combustion models coming; more later in the review) and E-3008, so you don't get some seven-inch affair in the UN-spec entry model, and in general it's a deeply impressive system to gaze upon. It isn't, however, strictly one screen; the instrument cluster bit is non-touch-capacitive for safety reasons, so it's in truth a pair of displays which have been very, very, very neatly integrated into one housing.
The central infotainment part of it can be a bit laggy and unresponsive, though, but it generally operates intuitively enough, while the configurable i-Toggle buttons below this are a neat conceit - even if you can be mischievous and set all ten swipe-able buttons to the same in-car function (our colleague felt we needed five heated steering wheel switches, for instance; well, we are getting old these days, so...), Peugeot somehow not including a sensibility software override that would preclude this sort of thing from happening.
Anyway, the tech is decent throughout, but the real star here is the material quality. Peugeot has done a grand job with the fabrics and upholsteries to make the interior as homely as it can, without sacrificing ergonomics on the altar of superficial attractiveness. There's also rather natty ambient lighting built into the heavily sculpted dashboard, which is eye-catching, but there is a slight visibility issue which rears its head at night, in that said lighting reflects rather noticeably on portions of the windscreen and front side-windows in the dark. Whoops.
Practicality
There's more room in the rear of the Peugeot E-3008 than you'd give it credit for, that latent break point in the roof really doing its job. Extremely tall people are still going to complain about headroom in the back, but otherwise space is decent there. Up front, two ginormous cubbies are revealed in what would be the transmission tunnel in an older car, these storage compartments found if you lift up a latched lid or look under the central armrest, while the boot measures the same 520 litres seats up as the 3008 it replaces. Naturally, having a rear screen as raked as the one on the E-3008 limits the outright cargo capability of this EV, as if you fold its second row of seats down you get 1,480 litres to play with - the old 3008 could lug up to 1,671 litres in the same circumstances.
Performance
The Peugeot E-3008 is the first product in the entire Stellantis Group to launch on STLA Medium, a new platform engineered to bring bigger batteries and greater EV capability to a conglomerate that, so far, has had to muddle along with lithium-ion power packs no bigger than a piffling 54kWh. So while you're looking at a Lion-branded coupe-SUV here, STLA-M will sit underneath any number of Citroen, DS, Vauxhall, Alfa Romeo, Jeep and Fiat EVs in the months and years to come, not to mention other electric Pugs as well.
But it's not an EV-dedicated platform, because the E-3008 will soon be joined by a 3008 Hybrid (note the lack of the 'E-' prefix in the model name, there), using the same 136hp petrol-electric powertrain that landed in the
old 3008 very late on in its life cycle. There will also be plug-in hybrid derivatives in the fullness of time, something the previous-gen 3008 had in abundance - including the
300hp Hybrid4.
For now though, there are three E-3008s to go at. There's this entry-level model, a single-motor, front-wheel-drive variant fitted with a 73kWh battery pack and a 214hp/345Nm propulsion unit, resulting in an 8.8-second 0-62mph time and a maximum theoretical range of 327 miles to a charge. It will imminently be followed by the Dual Motor AWD, which uses the same 73kWh battery pack but adds another e-motor on the rear axle for all-drive traction and a healthy 326hp peak power figure. Its range will be around the 325-mile mark.
There's then the 'biggie': the E-3008 Long Range. This has just the one motor again, although it's marginally uprated to 231hp, but it totes a whopping 98kWh battery pack. The maximum range of this fellow is aiming to be in the ballpark of 435 miles to a charge, which is phenomenal given Peugeot's prior trio of pure EVs - namely, the
E-208, the
E-2008 and the
E-308 - can achieve just 231, 250 and 267 miles to a charge respectively.
Sadly, neither the Dual Motor AWD nor the Long Range were available to test on this event, so we've only tried the 214hp 'plain' E-3008. And we fear that might have been an error on Peugeot's part, because while the other two EV models will surely bring some pizzazz to the party (be that either 6.4-second 0-62mph performance or more than 400 miles to one hit of mains electricity goodness), the standard single-motor's driving experience is largely unremarkable.
As in other Peugeot EVs, to get the full 214hp and 345Nm, you need to be in Sport mode. In Normal, you're basically in a 190hp/300Nm E-3008, while Eco restricts the powertrain to 170hp/270Nm. You'll notice those deficits. You 100 per cent will. But even in the first of these settings, the Peugeot coupe-SUV never feels even remotely fast or strong. It's smooth in its power delivery, which is admirable, but if you're seeking that thumping low-speed hit of instant torque, you ain't gonna find it in the E-3008.
The problem here is its weight. This is a single-motor model with the smaller of two battery packs, remember. Then recall, if you will, that the lightest Mk2 3008 weighed just 1,320kg. It may therefore startle you when we tell you this E-3008 tips the scales at... wait for it... ready? It's 2,108kg. Two-point-one tonnes. Crikey, no wonder they're not fitting a second motor to the 98kWh model, it'd end up with its own gravitational pull.
So not only does this bloated mass dull the acceleration characteristics of the E-3008, it doesn't do much for electrical efficiency either. We drove it on a 70-mile test route and, for reasons which will become apparent in the next section of the review, we hardly thrashed the poor thing to within an inch of its life. Yet it turned in 3.1 miles/kWh in coolish weather conditions, some way off the official 4.4 miles/kWh claim.
Ride & Handling
Heavy cars are rarely fun-to-drive cars, unless they've got tremendous great power outputs and/or advanced chassis hardware to overcome their bulk, and regrettably the Peugeot E-3008 has neither. The steering on it is nice enough and kudos to the Lion's engineers for the way the brake pedal has been calibrated, but if you start provoking the coupe-SUV, you get understeer very early, and then scrabbling front-wheel traction if you try and get back on the power too early on the exit of a bend. The car's just unhappy if you attempt to hustle it, so don't bother.
Is that a problem on an electric SUV, whose first remit isn't surely going to be 'must drive like the best hot hatchbacks in history'? Well no, of course not, but Peugeot is one of the sporty brands in the Stellantis stable and you'd expect its products to have a bit of dynamic edge as a result, even the electric coupe-SUVs. A good example in a rival collaborative would be the way Cupra manages to make its
Born drive in a fashion that's more interesting and engaging than the
Volkswagen ID.3, which is essentially exactly the same EV underneath it all.
Thankfully, the kinematic pay-off is that the E-3008 is excellent for rolling refinement. Peugeot doesn't bother augmenting the passenger compartment with induced sound effects in any of the three driving modes, so then you can focus on the way the sleeker body cuts effortlessly through the air and thus keeps wind noise down to a minimum. Tyre rumble is also well-contained, while the ride quality is generally very pleasant - at higher speeds and on smoother road surfaces, that is. On poor, rucked-up urban roads, the 20-inch-shod GT can sometimes be out-and-out crashy and borderline uncomfortable, thumping its way over speed bumps and proving itself way too informative about only mild imperfections in the tarmac, this again being a lead-footed trait that betrays its robust weight.
Value
The GT specification comes with a lot of desirable kit, including 20-inch alloys, ambient interior lighting, a powered tailgate, and electrically adjustable, heated, ventilated and massaging front seats, among more, but bizarrely Peugeot said it has taken the decision to ensure that models destined for western European markets won't get a heat pump as standard, because their 'climates are warm enough for that not to be necessary'. And yep, the UK qualifies as one of those markets. Er... Peugeot head honchos: you have
been to the UK, haven't you?
Clunking heat-pump omission aside, the E-3008 GT is well-equipped and feels like a premium product throughout, but as it also costs 350 notes shy of 50 grand in this specification then they're really the bare minimum things we expect from what is incontrovertibly an expensive car. Again, if this is the price of the single-motor 73kWh model, how much are the Dual Motor AWD and Long Range going to set people back when they arrive?
A quick few words on charging. Peugeot offers the E-3008 with 11kW AC onboard charging functionality, which means on a typical 7.4kWh domestic wallbox you're looking at eight hours to go from 20 per cent battery to full. Its maximum charging rate is 160kW DC, which will do a 20-80 per cent top-up of the power pack in 30 minutes.
Verdict
In many ways, the new Peugeot E-3008 is a big success. It looks good on the outside, it's lovely inside, it drives in a smooth and cosseting fashion (most of the time), and it now has the sort of 250-mile-ish real-world driving range that a decent family EV should enjoy. But we kind of feel it hasn't really moved the electric game on one iota. It's heavy, it's expensive, it's lumbering in the corners and it doesn't ever feel particularly fleet of foot. We're eager to try the 326hp and 435-mile derivatives as soon as we can, then, because on this showing the E-3008 is perfectly fine... but we were hoping for a bit more than 'fine' from it, to be honest.
