A man sits in the driver’s seat of a car with his head in his hands, obviously in despair. The car is facing a red light at a busy junction. The man’s wife is speaking soothingly to him. In the rear seats, their little children are anxiously asking “Daddy, what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong,” I yell in reply, “is this blasted satnav. It directed me into a right-turn only lane. Now it is telling me to turn left. Which is impossible. It has already made us late. Now we’re going to be even later.”
“Why don’t you just switch it off and trust your sense of direction?” my wife asked.
“Because I don’t know where we are,” I moaned. “It has got us completely lost.”
A review of the world’s first diesel hybrid – now available in both the Peugeot 3008 Hybrid4 and the Citroën DS5 Hybrid4 – ought, obviously, to be about that intriguing, breakthrough technology. But the satnav in the Peugeot was so maddeningly inept that – like a spouse at the altar whose breath stinks of cod liver oil for that first married kiss – it left me remembering little else. On each of the four days that I borrowed the car, the satnav did me an unpardonable wrong.
Shortly before I tested the Peugeot, however, I had an hour in Citroën’s DS5 Hybrid4, which is essentially the same car under a different skin. I didn’t need the satnav for that hour. My thoughts about the Citroën are, therefore, kinder and fairer. So let’s concentrate on the DS5. Which is more than a little wonderful.
The DS range is already established as the best-looking new Citroëns for half a century. They may be little more than rebodied versions of deeply uninspiring models like the C3 and C4 but the DS sub-brand has restored Citroën’s reputation for stylish design which had been in the pits since the ill-starred but beautiful XM of the Nineties.
The DS5 is the most extraordinary development so far in the line – a uniquely stylish SUV crossover with a lavishly equipped interior which is most like being in a private jet. With the diesel hybrid version, however, Citroën has produced a car which is not only an extraordinary shape-shifter to look at but is also its most technically innovative model since the Citroën-Maserati SM of the Seventies.
A diesel electric hybrid has been longed-for by car enthusiasts for almost as long as a reliable satnav system. The received wisdom was that the combination of diesel engine with nickel-hydride battery and electric motor would be too expensive to develop and would return too little advantage over a petrol hybrid. In any case, some of the countries that are most keen on hybrids, such as Japan and America, are congenitally opposed to diesel.
The system developed by Peugeot and Citroën knocks that orthodoxy for six. It combines a 161bhp, two-litre turbodiesel that drives the front wheels with a 36bhp electric motor for the rear wheels. The result is a permanent four-wheel-drive set-up with 200bhp, some versions of which get under the 100g/km limit, securing £0 for road tax and exemption from London congestion charging (and thus guarantees low benefit-in-kind taxation for business users).
This unique combination – all-weather capability, with high performance and low emissions – turns out to be almost as seductive in reality as it sounds in principle.
The driver can switch the system, choosing sport, 4x4 or all-electric options. Or you can run in the auto setting which switches according to need and conditions.
The four-wheel-drive option would be left for dead by a Land Rover and the sport setting would wallow in the wake of a Porsche; but the fact that both are on offer in a five-door, full five-seater with up to 465 litres of boot space is almost head-spinningly inspired and inventive.
Is it too much to ask that such a startling innovation should also include a reliable navigation system?
