Styling
Peugeot's striking 2023 front-end updates were carried out on the entire 508 family, with the big grille and the 'Lion claw' daytime-running lamps seguing into the headlights giving it a fresher face, so the only real question with the big Peugeot is whether you go for a Fastback or an SW. And if you're not picking the latter, then we'd respectfully say you're doing it all wrong. The Fastback is a handsome car, granted, but the SW is the clear aesthetic winner. Especially in the GT specification, which teams black exterior detailing with some lovely 19-inch 'Augusta' diamond-cut alloys (part of a £1,300 option pack bundled with Adaptive Suspension Control) for one of the best-looking estate cars we can remember in recent years. It might be a seven-year-old design in 2025, but the 508 SW is still a showstopper.
Interior
As it always has been, the cabin of the 508 is built around Peugeot's 'i-Cockpit' philosophy, so the key to whether you like it or not will be whether you get on with the driving position that's focused on a small, low-mounted steering wheel beneath a high-set digital instrument cluster. As we understand it, if you're of kind of average height, you'll get on with it better than if you're really tall or really short, but we know of one couple who own a new
E-308 with a fair old height difference between the two of them, and they both love driving it equally with no complaint from either about seeing the cluster. So maybe i-Cockpit isn't so bad after all.
Anyway, quality-wise and in terms of aesthetic appeal, the 508's cabin is still a hit, with the standard technology including the decent touchscreen and cluster plus wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay - but some of the grander niceties in our example were expensive cost options. These included the eight-way electrically adjustable and massaging front seats (£2,050), the Focal hifi plus wireless smartphone charging pad (£900) and the Night Vision system (£1,300).
Practicality
Peugeot has positioned the 508 SW as one of those wagons that places form above function, so its 530-litre boot with all seats in play isn't much more than the Fastback at 487 litres. The rear seats fold down 60:40, liberating a far more useful 1,780 litres if required, so that's none too shabby at all, if still a way off the vast expanses found in the rear of a
Skoda Superb Estate. That said, if you pick the Czechian car
as a PHEV like this Peugeot, its boot figures drop to 510-1,770 litres, giving the Peugeot the edge on capacity; good news for fans of the SW. Otherwise, interior storage and rear passenger room are both decent on the 508, if not spectacularly generous.
Performance
When the ultimate expression of this 1.6-litre-based plug-in hybrid drivetrain is the 360hp set-up of the
Peugeot Sport Engineered model, you might expect the 225hp to feel a little lacklustre. But it's perfectly fine for the 508 SW. The 1.6 THP four up front is maybe not the most cultured operator in the world, yet it only becomes really vocal at very high revs. Thankfully, there's enough torque in the system to avoid such thrashy coarseness, so for the majority of the time the Pug just comes across as a suitably muscular and refined operator. Even the EAT8 transmission has been slicked back into something relatively unobtrusive these days, so there's little to complain about with the 508's powertrain.
Official figures place the 508 SW PHEV in the 200-275mpg bracket, with up to 42 miles of electric range possible. In reality, those sorts of numbers are only ever going to be achievable with a very certain set of parameters in place that very few real-world drivers could hope to attain, so we'd go with the fact that the car exceeded 40mpg (41.4mpg) across 280 miles in our care as a more realistic - and reasonable - figure, which we reckon isn't too bad for a 225hp petrol weighing nearly 1.8 tonnes in this format.
Ride & Handling
GT-spec Peugeots have previously had a tendency to be occasionally thumpy and a bit leaden in the ride comfort department, thanks to the suspension not always managing to deal with the unsprung mass of big alloys and their associated low-profile tyres as demanded by the stylists. But the aforementioned adjustable damping set-up optioned into our SW test car did a brilliant job of keeping the worst of the road surface's imperfections at bay from the passenger compartment, while mechanical refinement is commendably high. In short, we drove the car for a week and rarely ever complained about the way it dealt with considerable lumps and bumps in the tarmac, nor did it feel lost traversing craggy urban streets either. It was a suitably polished all-round showing, in fairness.
In terms of the handling, the 508 SW GT PHEV is pretty good, actually, with nice steering through that diminutive wheel and impressive levels of both body and wheel control, but it's not quite as zingy as you might imagine of a sporty-looking Peugeot (even if it's a
big sporty-looking Peugeot). It goes through corners about as well as the brand's GT badging requires, because the French firm uses this like its own take on 'M Sport'; as in, GT doesn't mean out-and-out performance values, it just means racier looks/interior, large wheels and toughened-up suspension. A slightly more positive spin on the Peugeot's roadholding attributes would be that nothing comparable in this class does things appreciably better, although as that's a limited field these days then perhaps we're damning the 508 SW with faint praise. We really hope we're not, however, because all in all we found the pleasant way the Pug drove to be most appealing - and certainly sharper and more involving than any equivalent-price SUV we can think of.
Value
Ah. Not an area we can easily gloss over, this. Even framed in context of new-car values suddenly seeming to accelerate in recent years so that every list price going makes you go 'woah' and involuntarily widen your eyes when you first see it, as production winds down then this 508 SW is only sold with this 225hp drivetrain and GT specification. For that, before you've even added options, it's £47,730. But our test car had quite a few things added to it, resulting in a hefty ticket just shy of 56 grand. And that's not far off what a basic, 374hp
BMW M340i xDrive Touring would cost you nowadays... for a four-cylinder, PHEV Peugeot. Mind, a well-specified Superb Estate PHEV is in the same ballpark, as is the plug-in-hybrid version of the latest
Volkswagen Passat. So maybe the 508 is pricey, or just
all D-segment wagons are pricey, depending on how you want to look at it.
Verdict
Chunky price notwithstanding, the Peugeot 508 SW 225 PHEV GT is still a great car - and refreshingly different to the SUV norm. It's strong in a wide array of departments and notably weak in none, and the attractive styling and cabin finishing only serve to heighten its levels of appeal yet further. But if you want one, better move fast. Time is running out for this generation of the 508 and it's not a given that Peugeot will replace it with a like-for-like successor. And, on this showing, we'll definitely be among those lamenting the passing of the D-sector Pug when it's gone.
