Peugeot boss: ‘We won’t chase the Chinese on price’

It has been the trend, for the past decade, that car brands we’ve thought of as being ‘mass market’ have increasingly nudged upwards into premium car territory. After all, these are the strange days where spending €70,000 on a Skoda or a Hyundai is not merely possible, it’s fast becoming commonplace.

Those brands have somewhat stealthily risen from bargain cars to posh status, but for Peugeot it has been an avowed intention. Following the lacklustre sales and critical performance in the early 2000s of cars such as the 307 and 407, Peugeot struck out on a march not merely back to middlebrow respectability (a status it arguably achieved with the launch of the second-generation 3008 SUV) but onward to a middle ground between mass market and premium.

And there it must stay. The recent amalgamation with Fiat-Chrysler to create the Stellantis Group has rather pincered Peugeot, as with brands such as Alfa Romeo, DS and Lancia in the same stable there’s little room for much more upward manoeuvre.

What Peugeot won’t do, though, is start chasing prices downward. Although the market is rapidly filling with affordable Chinese cars (the MG4 was the third-best selling electric car in Europe in the first half of this year), the company’s chief executive, Linda Jackson, told The Irish Times that Peugeot won’t lower itself to a low-cost strategy.

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“We’ve already moved upmarket, and it’s taken us 10 years to do that,” Jackson said, as we chatted on the fringes of the launch of the new electric e-2008. That’s a car whose price in Ireland is likely to rise as this new model, with its larger battery and greater range, arrives. “We’ve managed to create great residual values with this move upmarket,” said Jackson. “It puts us in a position which is sort of mainstream, but upper mainstream. So we’re not going to be suddenly dropping our prices. We want to continue to be accessible, but we want to maintain the market position that we have.”

That could be tricky, at a time when the like of MG is already making hefty inroads into the Irish market, giant carmaker BYD is just beginning its assault on Irish wallets and even Tesla is cutting prices to drive sales.

Jackson, though, is adamant. “In terms of the Chinese brands, I’m certainly not knocking them. I’ve driven many of the products and they’re great vehicles. But for Peugeot, we need to be true to our values. What are we offering that’s different? And we believe that we’re offering a design that’s much sharper, much more distinctive. That’s our strength. We’re offering an interior experience which is different with the i-cockpit.”

Ah, the i-cockpit. That is Peugeot’s term for its dashboard layout, with a tiny hexagonal wheel that almost sits in your lap, and a digital instrument screen set up high in your direct eye line. It’s an oft-controversial design, one as apt to draw groans of annoyance as squeals of delight. Is it wise, we ask, to hang Peugeot’s success on something so divisive?

Jackson smiles: “In this world, you can never please everybody. And you know, I’ve got more than 11 million people driving around happy in Peugeots. so I think you have to be strong and bold and that is a USP for us. As I say there are 11 million people that like the i-cockpit, and therefore that you inevitably will have some people who don’t like it. Some people like analogue watches; others like digital. In all of the research that we’ve done, when we look at the two most important reasons that sort of score the highest in terms of why people buy a Peugeot, across the world – if you go to Brazil, you go to Australia, you go to South Africa, you go to Ireland – is, number one, exterior design, which is the sharpness of the design. And the second one is interior design, the i-cockpit. Unfortunately, I can’t make a car that’s going to please everybody and we try to please as many as possible.”

Peugeot is about to give that i-cockpit its biggest ever update. When the next-generation 3008 arrives in Ireland at the beginning of next year, it will not only be all-electric (at least at first; hybrid models will follow), and on a new platform that promises potential EV ranges of up to 700km, but it will have a new i-cockpit. Gone will be the separate screens, and in will come a curved, 21-inch combined instrument panel and infotainment system. The small hexagonal wheel remains, but it gains more high-tech (possibly more frustrating, if some rival models are anything to go by) haptic touch-sensitive buttons.

This new e-3008 will be one of the first Stellantis Group models to use the new STLA electric car platform. How, we asked Jackson, will she ensure that Peugeots remain distinct and different from the cars made, using the same bits, by Citroen, Opel, Alfa Romeo, Jeep et al?

“If you think about it, we’ve been living that life for 10 years now,” she says. “We have the 3008, Citroen has the C5 Aircross, Opel has the Grandland – three different cars built using the same platform, and yet all three stick to the individual brand personalities. So we’re used to it, and sure we have 14 brands now in the group, but we’re very efficient about how we make use of all the technologies. As brand CEO I make my choices, but the choices that Thierry Koskas at Citroen makes will be different, and so on. We know that so we need to be very strong on that and differentiate ourselves like that. So I think it’s perfectly possible because we’ve proved we can already do it.”

[ Peugeot’s new electric 308 claims a range of 400km ]

One thing Jackson won’t do is dip too heavily into Peugeot’s back catalogue for classic designs to apply to new electric models, a move which puts her at diametric opposites with the management at Peugeot’s great French rival, Renault. Renault is leaning heavily on the retro button, about to launch electric remakes of the classic R5 and R4 models.

For Jackson, though, it’s much more about modernity, and about getting electric replacements for current models created.

“I’m not a great fan of recreating or doing that sort of thing. However, I do think that we can take some of the values, the thing that made the best cars of the past the best,” she says.

“Take the 205, for example, what made the 205 GTI so popular, what are the elements and the values that we could take and bring to today? I’m not planning to make high-performance vehicles and compete with all of these at the moment. My priority is to replace the vehicles, the ones that are all best sellers within their area, and then afterwards, it’s about what opportunities can you find, to take some of those values that were part of the 205, for example, and how do we inject them into the future, but that’s still work in progress.”

Jackson’s reluctance to countenance, or at least consider, high performance models stands at slight odds with Peugeot’s return to Le Mans. In spite of predictions of a wipeout for the French brand in this year’s 24-hour race, the gorgeous 9X8 race car led the race for a time, outrunning Ferrari, Porsche, and Toyota into the night, even if only briefly. Surely Peugeot aims to back up such performance with high-performance road cars?

“I look at it in a slightly different way,” says Jackson. “Which is that I see motorsport as a laboratory for technology, which means that we develop a lot of technology on the hypercar whether it be on hybridisation, electrification, tyres, aerodynamics, suspension, as well as certain levels of software that we have actually taken and put on to the PSE versions of the 508. So the PSE road cars and the race cars are designed by the same engineers, the same designers. So I turn it around and look at it the opposite way. We use the technology and then we put it on cars that you and I drive. And that’s, I think, very important because, why do I do motorsport?

“Well, I could say because we love it, and we’re passionate and all that. But actually, there’s two other reasons. One is this laboratory, which gives us the ability to, in a really start-up type of organisation, to create technologies that we can then use and develop. And the third thing is, it’s an enormous marketing tool for me. It shows our engineering ability, what we can do. So it’s about taking the technology as opposed to simplistically saying: ‘We’re going to produce performance cars.’ It’s more about the technology we develop.”