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| Is it an estate car? Is it an MPV? Seven-seater option blurs the boundaries |
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Putting seven seats in an estate car is a brilliant idea, particularly when the rear two rows can be folded flat - or even removed entirely. This gives the Peugeot 308 SW many of the advantages of an MPV, without the tall, roly-poly feeling that MPVs can have on bendy roads. But then the lack of height has disadvantages, too. Like the fact that only fairly short people can fit in the middle and back rows. (Peugeot says the car has 'semi-tall architecture', so perhaps it would be kinder to say that only semi-tall people can squeeze in the back.)
Nor can your passengers afford to be too wide, because the three seats in the middle row are all the same size. Which is great if you have triplets or other identically sized, semi-narrow passengers but not so good if you're transporting fully grown adults: those middle seats are extremely short on elbow (or hip) room. You can, however, overcome this to some extent by another unusual Peugeot trick. All three seats are individually removable, so you can choose to have just one seat, two adjacent seats - or even two central seats. Just don't try sitting in the rearmost seats unless you are no bigger than my thumb.
But enough of the seating arrangements, clever though they are. There's a wide choice of engines, with petrol units ranging from 94bhp 1.4 to 173bhp 1.6, and diesels from 89bhp 1.6 to 134bhp 2.0. Gearboxes are a mix of manual and auto, 4-speed, 5-speed and 6-speed, and the big news here is that the new six-speed manual (standard on the bound-to-popular 1.6 HDi 110) is a huge improvement on the disliked 'boxes which went before.
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