Peugeot 5008 long-term test

• The car Peugeot 5008 Allure Puretech 130 s/s
• Run by Jim Holder, editorial director
• Why it’s here To discover if real life can find any holes in the armoury of our favourite seven-seat SUV
• Needs to Make family life easy with a touch of flair and deliver low running costs across the board

Price £28,780 Price as tested £29,885 Miles covered 1112 Official fuel economy 54.3mpg Test economy 37.4mpg Options Metallic paint (£525); Black diamond roof (£280); 19-inch alloy wheels (£300)

14 August 2018 – Child's play

You can’t fool kids – or so I was always told. In my last report, I mentioned that my two, plus their three cousins, had clambered from the five rear seats of a Skoda Kodiaq into those of a Peugeot 5008 in the space of a week and declared the latter to be vastly superior. I also suggested that the tape measure agreed with their assessment.

However, it turns out they (and my tape measure) were only mostly right. The Peugeot wins everywhere bar middle row head and knee room, where it's actually a couple of centimetres down on the Kodiaq and the Nissan X-Trail. The reasons (and get ready for excuses) for the misunderstandings are: 1) I didn’t consider head room because my eldest is only 12, and 2) because the Peugeot’s three middle seats each slide individually. The latter is a huge bonus over most rival cars but led to my measuring going awry.

The brilliance of these three seats is that adults get enough shoulder space to sit in a row, adding comfort and avoiding those awkward moments when you have to ferret around your travelling companions’ nether regions while you seek out the seatbelt clip.

It’s worth noting, too, that the knee room is adequate for even above-average-size adults, and that there’s no transmission tunnel running up the middle of the 5008, as there is in the Kodiaq, meaning that even the middle-seated passenger has a flat floor on which to rest their feet. What’s more, because each seat also slides fore and aft, long-distance travel is much more comfortable when there is nobody in the rearmost seats.

The roof height issue is more intriguing. Again, for even slightly taller-than-average adults there's no issue in the Peugeot 5008. For almost all people, almost all of the time, there is nothing of note.

However, a neighbour, eager to compare, has alerted me to the fact that this situation does change dramatically if you have a panoramic glass roof fitted. The glass may bathe the inside of the car with light, but it seriously eats into head room. That’s fine if only children will ever travel in the back two rows, but it is so intrusive that it needs careful consideration otherwise.

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