Peugeot 508 PSE review: fast, frugal and great to drive – as you’d hope for your £55,000

That means four-wheel drive, with the front wheels driven by either a petrol engine or an electric motor, or both, and another electric motor across the rear axle. In pure electric mode it utilises the rear motor, making it rear-wheel drive, while in hybrid mode and normal use, it’ll power just the front wheels, though it’ll also send power to the rear if it’s needed there, for example if you’re pressing on a bit. Got that? Good. Keep up at the back.

But that isn’t all. In addition to the standard electronically adjustable suspension, you also get a wider track at both the front and rear, along with 380mm brake discs and four-piston calipers; the Peugeot Sport Engineered treatment isn’t merely a snortier engine and a set of graphics. Peugeot has also lowered the driving position relative to the standard car’s, so you feel closer to the action. 

And as befits the PSE’s place at the top of the 508 range, its equipment list is pretty comprehensive. Adaptive cruise control, night vision, keyless entry, a top-down parking camera, and a top-spec hi-fi – all come as standard, along with LED rear lights that sweep back and forth in a rather cute display when you unlock the car. 

The lowdown

It’s a slightly larger car than the BMW M340i Touring, Audi S4 Avant and Mercedes-AMG C43 Estate, the three premium-badged rivals it ostensibly goes up against, though it’s about the same size as the much cheaper – and also plug-in – Volkswagen Passat GTE. 

However, it’s long and low – so if you’re expecting the amount of space you’ll see in a Passat, you’ll be disappointed. In fact, it’s fairer to compare the 508 with the soon-to-arrive –  and wordily named – Arteon eHybrid Shooting Brake. 

Climb aboard, noting the coupé-esque frameless windows, and that sleeker bodyshell makes itself felt; you sit low, and the roof is closer to your head than in a normal estate car. That said, you don’t actually feel cramped, and when you’re hunkered down behind the dashboard with its downward-sloping centre console, the 508 feels rather sporty.

In the back, the same applies. Even though the roof and floor seem closer to you and there isn’t quite as much space as you’d find in a Passat, neither do you feel hemmed-in; indeed, there’s as much room as, if not more than you’ll find in any of its premium rivals.

That dashboard is a smart-looking thing, too, with lovely piano-key buttons, high-quality materials, and a good, instantly legible set of virtual dials atop the compact steering wheel. The entertainment system is the only weak spot here, with its pernickety interface, and it features our eternal bugbear of climate controls that are buried in a menu, rather than offering separate, physical buttons.

There are some well-placed cubbies and a big storage bin beneath that high centre console, giving you plenty of places to store bits and pieces out of sight, and the boot is still a decent size for what the marketeers want us to call a shooting brake these days; notably, you get a space-saver spare wheel as standard, too.

Money no object

Right. Time to talk about the elephant in the room. Or rather, the 53,995 of them – because that’s how many of your finest pounds sterling you’ll need to get behind the wheel of the standard 508 hatchback; what’s more, you’ll need to add a further £1,800 to that figure to get yourself into an estate (or SW, in Peugeot parlance) like the one we tested. 

Whichever way you square it, that’s an awful lot of money, even for one of the 508’s premium rivals. For a car with a Peugeot badge on it, it might be too much. That’s certainly the way the lease companies see it – on the day we checked, through the same lease company, a 508 PSE SW would have cost you more than half as much again to lease as an M340i Touring.

Those figures will have been influenced by the way finance houses expect resale values to go; indeed, after four years, the 508 is predicted to be worth even less than its premium rivals, despite starting out more expensive. In other words, the 508 PSE will look like terrific value on the used market; as a new car, however, not so much. 

Its saving grace, of course, is that you can run it on electric power, which means if you’ve got somewhere to charge it up at home and plan to use it for lots of short trips around town or an average-sized commute, you’ll save an awful lot on fuel costs. Whether you’ll save enough to mitigate what you’ll lose in depreciation is another matter entirely.

But the fact the 508 PSE is a plug-in hybrid means its CO2 emissions figures, gleaned from an official test that favours such things, are low. That in turn means low company car tax, given the tax system is based on those figures, and that makes the PSE a relatively affordable company car – especially so for something with this level of performance.

The fast show

And this is, let’s make no bones about it, a fast car, with a 0-62mph time of just 5.2 seconds. That said, it’s a touch off the pace despite similar power figures to its rivals, which is no great surprise given the 508’s extra weight. 

It’s a more laid-back car in the flesh, too. First you get the surge of the electric motor, then the petrol engine comes in, but even when it does so, you don’t get a dramatic shove in the back. Instead, the pace snowballs; you seem to gather acceleration as you gather speed until suddenly you realise you’re not only travelling quite quickly, but accelerating rapidly too. 

What’s really impressive is the integration of the two power units; yes, you can fluster the 508 if you really clog the throttle with no warning, at which point it has to coordinate starting up the petrol motor while also changing down a gear. But the majority of the time it’s actually pretty hard to detect the shuffling of the drivetrain beneath you, which isn’t something that can be said for Volkswagen’s less potent system. 

And you can solve this problem, by switching to Sport mode, at which point the petrol engine stays on, and in this way the car always responds to the throttle pretty well.

Doing this also gets around the other issue with using a plug-in hybrid to bump up performance, which is that you notice a significant drop-off in power at full throttle if the battery runs completely flat, as the electric motors can’t bolster the petrol engine’s performance. In Sport mode, however, the petrol engine charges up the battery so that you’ve always got some power in reserve.

Sport mode also hunkers down the suspension, and while the difference is subtle, it is noticeable. You get an enhanced engine note piped in through the speakers in this mode, but thankfully this, too, is relatively unobtrusive, and while that means the soundtrack is somewhat underwhelming, somehow that suits this car’s less in-your-face attitude to performance.

What’s less easy to excuse is the gearbox. In automatic mode it’s fine, shifting gears as swiftly as you’d hope, but the problem comes when you try to switch it into manual mode, and find there isn’t one. 

Sure, you can tug at the paddles behind the steering wheel, but it’s pot luck as to whether they’ll shift up or down for you; worse still, if you shift down early in anticipation of an overtake, but don’t then prod the throttle soon enough, the car will change back up for you. Usually, this happens just as you’re pulling out onto the wrong side of the road.

Normally the lack of a manual mode might not be such an issue, but this is a performance car, with driver involvement supposedly at its heart, not to mention one that’s going head-to-head with some of the finest performance autos in the game; that it lacks the ability to fully control the gears yourself shows up the gearbox’s humble origins rather too pointedly

Smooth operator

The PSE can handle, though. The first time you tip the nose into a corner, you can feel the effect of those changes to the chassis, which bring a much more planted feel than the standard car and result in huge amounts of grip. You can feel the effect of that electric motor, too, so when you step on the power the car feels rear-led, rather than front, which gives you the ability to subtly alter your line using the throttle.

The steering doesn’t give you much feel, but it’s quick and responsive; in fact, Peugeot has managed to make the whole car feel light and small around you, so that you feel like you’re in a hot hatch rather than a big estate – no mean feat in something as heavy as a plug-in. 

Yes, it lacks the nth degree of involvement you’ll get with an M340i, but 508 PSE is still a car of real depth on a twisting road; you can grow into it, building up a rhythm from corner to corner and leaning on the prodigious grip and traction – not to mention that lovely, gutsy mid-range performance. 

It’s a softer, less aggressive way of going fast, and as befits that character, the ride is suitably pliant, flowing over bumps with more grace than its German rivals can muster. On the motorway especially, the 508 PSE lopes along beautifully, keeping wind and road noise in check impressively while smothering bumps; you get the impression this would be a fantastic way to cross a country in a day.

And then, of course, you plug it in and charge it up, and it whisks you around on electric power alone. Here especially the 508 impresses; you see, because the rear electric motor doesn’t have to drive through a gearbox, it really can deliver the same sort of seamless acceleration and deceleration you’d get in a pure EV, something that can’t be said for two-wheel-drive PHEVs. 

So when you aren’t in the mood to chuck it around, the PSE whisks you through the bedlam of town traffic silently and smoothly, its suspension endowing the ruts and bumps with velvet edges and the Focal stereo dribbling soothing music into your ears, and in this way, it offers something its rivals simply can’t.

The Telegraph verdict

Yes, the 508 PSE lacks the crackling, popping sturm-und-drang and pin-sharp precision in which its German rivals specialise. But instead, it goes about its business with the effortless suavity of a well-dressed Parisian – and that’s just as appealing.

Two things keep it from being a five-star car here, however: that gearbox, firstly, and the terrifying price and resale values. This is not an easy car to justify financially, unless of course you’re able to choose one as a company car.

But if you can do so, or if you’ve made your peace with the fact owning one is going to be a costly exercise, you’ll reap the rewards, for the 508 PSE manages for the most part to combine all the benefits of a plug-in hybrid with the joy of a well set-up performance car. 

Much like the 505 Turbo that preceded it, it pulls away from outright driver focus to offer a slightly more comfort-oriented bent than its rivals – but that’s no bad thing, as the result is the same: a brilliant fast cruiser that still has the capacity to entertain.

Telegraph rating: Four stars out of five

The facts

On test: Peugeot 508 Peugeot Sport Engineered SW

How much? £55,795 on the road (saloon from £53,995)

How fast? 155mph, 0-62mph in 5.2sec

How economical? 138.9mpg (WLTP Combined)

Engine/gearbox: 1,598cc four-cylinder petrol engine, 355bhp (total system maximum), eight-speed automatic gearbox, four-wheel drive

The electric bits: AC motor with 11.5kWh Li-ion battery, 3.7kW on-board charger, Type 2 charging socket

Electric range: 24 miles

CO2 emissions: 46g/km

VED: £0 first year, £480 next five years, then £145

Warranty: 3 years / 60,000 miles (unlimited mileage in first two years)

Boot size: 530 litres

Spare wheel as standard: Yes

The rivals

BMW M340i xDrive Touring

369bhp, 32.6mpg, £52,400 on the road

The M340i is probably the pick of these fast estates at the moment, and does the job so well it’s hard to see why you’d choose anything else. It’s sharper and faster than the Peugeot, not to mention endowed with a much better gearbox, and as a private buy, its stronger resale values make more sense. But of course, it lacks the plug-in element, and that makes it a much costlier company car. 

Audi S4 Avant

336bhp, 38.7mpg, £50,810 on the road

The diesel-powered S4 will probably edge the 508 on fuel economy once its battery’s been depleted, and matches its chops as a high-speed cruiser. It’s slightly less potent, but it’s also cheaper – and you won’t be hiding behind the salesman’s sofa when the time comes to part-exchange it. 

Volkswagen Arteon 1.4 TSI eHybrid R-Line

215bhp, 201.8mpg, £41,485 on the road

We haven’t had a chance to drive this plug-in version of VW’s suave shooting brake yet, but it’s much cheaper to buy and to run than the Peugeot. Of course it’s also much slower, and given it lacks the 508’s trick chassis tweaks, it probably won’t be quite as sassy to drive, either. But if you just want a handsome plug-in estate, it might well do the job for less. 

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