Peugeot 408 - long-term review

"Something's wrong when you need a touchscreen to control your touchscreen," said a friend of mine dismissively. But I really like the so-called i-Toggles. It's a shallow screen just below the main centre screen, on which reside six shortcut icons. By default they show obvious stuff: home, climate, CarPlay, navigation, media, phone. But because it's a screen and not fixed buttons you can change them. After two months of fiddling I have them to my liking.

By the way, below the i-Toggles are a row of rather nicely crafted metal buttons. They too are in effect shortcuts. De-mist, heated rear screen, recirculate, and one that changes the main screen to show the full climate controls, and one that does the same to show some useful car controls like lane-assist and surround camera.

Right, so I don't need one of the i-Toggles to show 'climate' because I have a hard-button. I also don't need one to show CarPlay because I've discovered that a long-press of the home icon does the same thing. I don't need 'phone' because that's embedded in CarPlay, and anyway I nearly always dial by voice because Apple nearly always gets that right. (As in all cars that have a steering wheel mic button, long-press it to invoke Siri). So that's freed me up three I-Toggles for things I want fast.

That'll be BBC Radio 4 and Radio 6Music for two of them. The third is the seats' heating and massage. After all winter's here and I've got a bad back at the mo. 'Media' I've moved to the screen opened by the 'home' button, and I've replaced that with 'settings'.

Ah yes, you can change the homescreens too, which I have done, prioritising things like quick access to tone controls. I also have the temperature sliders, fan and a/c on-off buttons permanently up alongside a radio station display.

Oh and you can also customise the driver's display, but I prefer to keep that simple: big round dials for fuel and revs, and temp and fuel bars.

Overall it's a really handy and good-looking system that lets me shortcut to all the things I frequently use. I was driving the Volvo EX30 the other day and ended up holding it up to their UX designers, who've produced a pretty but infuriatingly inflexible system that demands four or five jabs at the screen to do things I can do with one or two in my Peugeot setup.

By the way, if I'm not running CarPlay, the built-in satnav works pretty well, with a reliable traffic feed and clear junction diagrams popping up on the driver's screen at the right moment.

Is it just me or is wireless charging in cars usually pretty spotty? I think it's because the phone slides around on the mat and misses its inductive sweet-spot. So here's my top tip: make two L-shaped pieces of Blu-Tac and stick them to the mat so the phone is cradled in the just-so position.