E-208 as GTI a bad idea
Peugeot is taking the GTI label out of mothballs, and the first neo-GTI will be the e-208, an electric hot hatch. Peugeot’s new boss Alain Favey decided this two months after his arrival, and my view on that decision can be summarized in two words: stupid token politics.
Has that man been living under a rock? Sporty sensations in sporty EVs are an illusion. Not because they aren’t sporty, but because ordinary EVs offer the same speed experience and unfortunately never make the bloody sound that excited men of my generation forty years ago in the noise blocks of the real hot hatches of the time: the 205 and Golf GTI, the Escort XR3i, the Renault 5 Turbo. To make an EV an acoustic fun machine, you really have to pull out all the stops with fake shift flippers and fake sound, as Hyundai did with the amazing 5N. Then you end up in a driving Hollywood movie. It looks great, it sounds like a spectacular adventure and it’s still all fake. Technically, the EV has beaten almost all the dream cars from the combustion era. My Mini accelerates faster than the sorely missed Mercedes E500 Limited that was the non plus ultra for me twenty years ago. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to it. There is no experience. You experience the chemical acceleration of all EVs. The exciting electronic sound adds nothing. So, drivers who were once fierce will sit comfortably on the blisters. Me too, with 313 hp under my ass. Never mind.
Fully electric is like parachuting
Why do you think you so rarely see those electric lease cars with power up to well over 500 hp and Porsche-like sprint talents driving hard on highways and driveways? Maybe because the helmsmen are decent people or because they want to save their batteries, it’s all possible. But the real reason, I swear to you, is that the lust has passed them. Thanks to the EV, the Dutch fleet became an unbeatable powerful army that never attacks. Going full throttle with an EV is like parachuting. Kicking, but you do it once and never again. Moreover, nowadays everyone can do it, while the kick of tearing was always that you belonged to a small circle of the elect. The exclusivity is completely gone.
Peugeot, think of something better!
So please, Peugeot, that GTI label means nothing to younger motorists who have to buy your cars. Think of something better. A 208 with a back seat you can sit on, a 5008 without a recall. Those old cows are stone dead, their myth has been overtaken by evolution. I noticed that when I took a tour in a 205 GTI years ago. It was certainly life-threatening in the border area, I know all the tough stories, but so was an Opel Omega at the time, I can report from experience. Cars have become much safer in recent decades and that also makes it all a lot less exciting. Because fun for young boys is everything you do on the edge. Anyway: the brave, adapted millennial who steps into a 205 GTI after a year of driving his father’s Tesla Model 3 Performance will be horrified in 2025. Was there really violence in that friendly sheep that Dad glorified by the fireplace on Friday evening after three Bavarias as the most beautiful, wildest time of his life? Not to be burned ahead! If the son then dives into the data, he probably won’t have it at all anymore. “Would you like to explain this dad? Am I seeing this right, one hundred and twenty-two hp with something called a catalyst, while your Model 3 has almost 500? Am I crazy or are you?” Dad won’t be able to explain it. He thinks, like the new Peugeot boss, that you bring the dead to life by dragging them out of the grave. That’s not how it works. You only show why they are dead. Nostalgia is always a bad sign for car manufacturers. Those who look back fear the future. And rightly so, because there is not much to gain there for car romance. There, millennials will call the shots who cheerfully step into autonomous cars and happily whatsapp without a fine. That’s the tragedy. The happiness that CEO Favey wants to revive is something from the past, that childish flirtation with the law, the guardrail and death.