Driven to extinction: Peugeot 508

There it was, buried in the bowels of an otherwise upbeat Peugeot 3008 SUV press release. Just one line that you might well have skipped over as you glazed over reading about hybrid powertrains.

“In response to changing consumer preferences in the segment, Peugeot Australia has confirmed the 508 will be retired from the local range, with limited stock remaining in the network,” the company said, at a stroke killing off probably the most delightful car it had built in recent years.

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Regular readers of this page will know that this is the fate of most cars: a huge fanfare upon entry to market and then the most perfunctory announcement of their end, or worse, the ignominy of none at all. Only a handful of cars get the razzle-dazzle press shot of the final car, no doubt bought by some loyal fan of the marque.

The 508 always faced an uphill battle in Australia, largely due to three key issues. It wasn’t an SUV, it was French, and the pricing was so optimistic that only the most ardent Francophile would ever countenance it. As lovely as the outgoing model was, there’s something about the search string “$81K front-wheel-drive sedan with 165kW” that makes little in the way of sense. A Camry hybrid was bigger, unarguably better built and around half the price.

That’s not to say the 508 won’t be missed. It was a gem of a car. The first launch versions to make landfall were powered by a zesty BMW-developed 1.6-litre turbo four. I drove one to Alpe d’Huez for a combined driving and cycling feature back in the February 2019 issue of Wheels, and the car was a lot more fun than the bike, with a rock-solid front end, quick steering and a 1465kg kerb weight which made it lighter than some Ford Focuses.

The year after, it was on the wrong end of a tiebreaker with the Mazda 3 for a finals berth at COTY, but all of the judges came away with a stack of respect for the agile middleweight. Perhaps Ash Westerman summed it up best with a prescient: “Deserves way more attention than it will probably get.” Much of that was down to the price, which opened at $53,990, making it more expensive than an equivalent VW Passat. It was likely doomed from the outset.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that Peugeot’s remedial action was to make the car uglier with an unnecessary 2024 facelift, while in the process introducing a plugin hybrid version that was $18,000 more expensive, but which offered no performance advantage over the standard car (which disappeared off price lists soon thereafter) and which added 300kg of lard to help neuter the 508’s erstwhile drawcard, its almost addictive agility.

With the Peugeot 508, parent company Stellantis seems to have contrived to mismanage a fundamentally good product at virtually every step of its journey. Now it’s gone and we may not see its like again. For those who appreciate a genuinely well-engineered and executed sedan, that’s a crying shame.

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Aussie sales

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