Road Test: Peugeot 308 1.2 e-THP 130 PureTech Allure 5dr

Back when I was a boy, the French made the best estates. They had names like Safari, Savannah and Break (yes, oddly to anglophones, that was spelled not Brake-as-in-Shooting but Break-as-in-Down). And they always had loads of space, thanks to extended wheelbases.

Peugeot is back to that with the 308SW - the wheelbase is up by 11cm versus the hatch, filled by longer rear doors. That means more back-seat legroom as well as more boot. The rear overhang is pulled out by another 22cm for a yet bigger hold. The rear seat backrests and cushions perform a double movement to fold fully flat, and all you have to do to execute this is to give a single tug to a lever. There are floor rails and tie-downs, and extra space under the floor, including, cleverly, somewhere to fit the detached roller blind. Seats-up, the boot is half as big again as most hatches, and with the whole chasm opened up, you have 1,660 litres to play with - or in. It's a proper estate, then.

The longer wheelbase should stabilise the ride, though, to be honest, I didn't think it was noticeably better than the regular hatch, which itself rides well enough, and I did drive them back-to-back. There was no real loss of agility, either. Nor any more noise, and some estates do get boomy. Nor much loss of rear visibility. But, heck, it's so much longer that parking will be no picnic.

There's more that's new on the 308. It gets Peugeot's new turbocharged direct-injected three-cylinder engine, in 110bhp and 130bhp tunes. There's hardly any lag, and it pulls with vim from sub-2,000rpm but keeps going cheerfully to the red line at 6,000rpm, and makes amazing economy numbers for a petrol in what is, as we've seen, a ruddy big car. Its sound signature has just enough of the characteristic triple flutter to make it interesting but stops short of eccentricity.

The performance and economy aren't just down to the engine. This 308SW with this engine is lighter than the old car with its four-cylinder, although the new estate, being so big, is 70kg more than the new hatch. There are also new low-resistance tyres, which manage that trick without any noticeable penalty in grip or ride smoothness. And the aero drag is better - under, over and through the car. What does this all mean, then? That the French can still do estates.