What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Kiss goodbye to your no-claims – Mr Fender-bender has a new toy ^{Peugeot 208 1.2 VTi Allure}

It is obviously very bad when someone becomes so consumed with a project or hobby that they lose the ability to talk or even think about anything else. Hobbies are a bit like crack cocaine. You think that maybe you’ll just dangle a worm in some water to see if you can catch a stickleback, and the next thing you know, you’re divorced because you spent all your life savings on a carbon-fibre rod, and you’re sitting by the side of a canal at five in the morning trying it out.

I’ve been there. Back in 1975 I became mildly interested in what we used to call hi-fis. And then, in the blink of an eye, I was very interested indeed and my girlfriend had gone off with someone who wasn’t really interested in anything very much at all.

I barely noticed because my new Marsden Hall speakers had arrived. Some say Wharfedale made a better unit but I disagreed. The Marsden Halls were perfect for my slimline black Teleton amp. I caught a train all the way to London to buy that.

The deck? At the time the Garrard SP25 was popular, but I took a holiday job as a milkman so I could afford the 86SB, which I teamed with a Shure M75ED cartridge. I’m not looking any of this stuff up. It was all ingrained in my head back then and it’s still there now. I actually know what sort of stylus I used, and its code name.

While my friends were out stealing traffic cones and trying to get into Annabel’s bra, I was to be found at my desk, soldering an unbelievably fiddly seven-pin Din plug so I could connect my recently bought Akai tape deck to the school’s PA system. I was very boring.

So you can imagine how I felt about the home-brand all-in-one ‘music centres’ that Currys and Comet started to sell in the 1980s. Oh, they looked all right, with all their flashing lights and damped cassette-release mechanisms. And I’m sure they were fine for listening to Dire Straits’ albums at suburban dinner parties. But for someone like me, they were only a forked tongue short of being the actual devil.

And so we arrive, naturally, at the Volvo 340 DL. As we know, this was a ghastly car. Made by people in Holland who thought Jesus was coming, it was powered by rubber bands, fitted with Mr Universe steering and styled during a game of consequences.

However, it was perceived to be strong and safe, so it attracted all the people who were not very good at driving and thought they may crash. This was unbelievably useful for the rest of us. If you saw a Volvo 340 DL coming the other way, you knew to be on your guard.

Eventually, however, Volvo decided to stop making bad cars for useless drivers, so the incompetent and weak decided en masse to switch to Rover. And again, this was good: see a 45 in the left lane, indicating left, and you knew not to assume it was actually going to turn left.

But then Rover went west and the bad drivers were suddenly hard to spot. Some were in Hyundais and Kias. Some were in Volkswagen Golfs. It was a dangerous period, but luckily Peugeot rode to the rescue. For many years this French company had made excellent cars but one day it decided to make a lot of very cheap rubbish for people with hearing aids, hats and a tendency to hang something from the rear-view mirror.

The other day I saw a Peugeot upside down at the entrance to the Hanger Lane underpass in west London. It is physically impossible to roll a car here, on what is a dead-straight piece of road. But Mr Pug Driver had managed it. And I recently saw another, balanced in pretty much the same place on the Armco.

Last week I came as close as I’ve been for years to having a head-on with a 308 that was on completely the wrong side of the road. It is uncanny this: Peugeots are invariably driven by someone who finds every single motoring event a complete surprise. ‘Oh my God, look. Those lights have just gone RED!’ ‘Holy cow. There’s another CAR!’

If I were running the police force, I would ask my officers to pull over all Peugeot drivers just to make sure they aren’t driving under the influence of Vera Lynn. Because they’re sure as hell driving under the influence of something.

To find out what it might be, I’ve just spent a week with a 208, or to be specific, the mid-range 1.2-litre VTi Allure. It’s a good-looking little thing and at £13,495 it’s well priced, too, especially given the amount of equipment provided as standard.

The only slight oddness is the steering wheel. It’s the size of a shirt button and it’s located very low down. So low that in the event of a crash, your testes would get such a thump from the airbag you’d wish you had died.

There were many nice things, though. For a 1.2 the engine delivers a surprising lump of punch. At one stage I was doing 70 mph, and that’s faster than a Peugeot has travelled for twenty years. I also liked the central command system that is used to operate everything.

The 208 is actually smaller on the outside than the car it replaces – the dreadful 207 – but inside, it’s bigger. So big, in fact, that there was space in the back, with the rear seats folded, for three dogs, one of which was larger than a diplodocus. Other things? Well, it was quiet and comfortable and the visibility was good.

All the time, though, I had a nagging doubt. On the face of it all was well, but every time I started the engine there was a beat before the electric power steering woke up. It was only a moment, but it told me that behind the flashing lights and the nice design touches, the engineering wasn’t quite as thorough as you might have hoped.

There’s more evidence too. It’s never an annoying car but it’s not what you’d call delightful, either. You don’t get the little shiver that you sometimes experience in a Fiat, or even a Volkswagen. This, then, to a car enthusiast is what those music centres were to me back in 1981. An attractive package with many features that is fine for playing Dire Straits as you drive to the shops. But not much else.

It is, therefore, a car for people who are not that interested in cars. And that explains everything. Because if you are not interested in something, you will be no good at it.

Perhaps that’s why Peugeot says in its advertisements that the 208 is a car that lets your body drive. It does, leaving your mind free to think about stuff that matters to you: the Blitz and how it used to be all trees around here.

I suppose, however, we can draw an interesting conclusion. If you – as a good driver – do buy a 208, you will find that all the traffic parts as you motor along. They will assume you are about to crash into something.

It might, therefore, be a faster and safer way of moving around than almost anything else on the road.