Key considerations
- Available for £27,000
- 1.6-litre inline four petrol turbo, two electric motors, all-wheel drive
- Well-balanced mix of petrol and electric power
- Chassis has a pleasingly old-school French feel about it
- Lovely on faster roads but the gearbox can get confused in towns
- No major issues and much better value used than new
This week we’re having a look at one of the rarest mainstream manufacturer cars you’re likely to see, or not see: Peugeot’s ‘sport by stealth’ 508 SW PSE estate. The non-estate versions of the second-generation (R83) Peugeot 508 were unveiled at the 2018 Geneva show. They were elegantly styled and had more than a hint of classic 505 about them, which was no bad thing. The SW station wagon that was announced in mid-2018 and launched at that year’s Paris show was very handsome, winning at least one international design award.
Our first order of business is to say well done to Peugeot for keeping the term ‘station wagon’ alive. Then we should congratulate them for eventually (in 2021) releasing the high-performance PSE version that we’re scrutinising here. It was the first car to come out under the new Peugeot Sport Engineered label. The idea behind that was to impress the market by showcasing Peugeot’s motorsport knowhow and its self-proclaimed but perhaps not quite so well known expertise in electrification.
If you were unconcerned by brand perceptions and/or powerfully built enough to have access to the top end of the fleet car catalogue, the PSE made an interesting blue-sky choice. It was by far the most performance-orientated 508 in a range that included a 128hp 1.5 diesel. In fact, the PSE was Peugeot’s most powerful road car ever, the 197hp from its turbo 1.6 four petrol brawnily boosted by 220hp from two electric motors for a total output of 355hp and 384lb ft. Yes, we know those numbers don’t add up. They never do. That’s because the ICE and electric elements don’t make their maximum powers at the same time.
Despite a weight of approaching 1.9 tonnes the combination of the meaty plug-in hybrid drivetrain and the all-wheel-drive chassis allowed the PSE to dart smoothly through the 0-62mph test in 5.2 seconds. Power delivery, ride quality and handling with adaptive damping as standard were all excellent. So were grip and traction. It wasn’t perfect mind, with a couple of minor shortcomings that we’ll get to later, but those aside the SW PSE was a surprisingly effective driver’s car with most of the practicality you’d expect from an estate.
Having thanked and congratulated Peugeot for creating the PSE, we must now commiserate with them for the market’s almost complete lack of interest in it. From a global total of only 7,000 508 PSEs built in all body formats, just 155 were sold in the UK. What was the problem? Well, it certainly wasn’t down to a shortage of speed, security, suavity or sophistication. Besides the active suspension it had night vision tech, auto cruise control, lane positioning assist, autonomous emergency braking, Nappa leather/Alcantara massage seats, Visio Park 3 with a 360-degree high-def camera, wireless phone charging, 3D navigation and FOCAL premium audio. All that was on top of the already generous range-wide 508 kit.
The SW PSE didn’t make it because it was expensive. Very expensive. Nearly £56,000 of expensive. Not only did that make it pricier than a BMW 330e xDrive M Sport Touring, it cost more than a BMW 530e M Sport Touring from the class above. For another £10k on top of your £56k you could be in an Audi RS4. Peugeot said it had made great strides in build quality, but even if you believed the line that the 508 matched the Germans on that front it was still tough to convince yourself that there was no ‘premium gap’ to bridge. Which one would you choose? Probably not the Peugeot.
In an attempt to stir up some interest, in March 2022 Peugeot announced a £4,000 price reduction on all 508 PSEs to take them under the psychologically difficult £50k barrier. That move brought non-estate versions down to £49,995, but the SW was still a challenging purchase at £51,795. A 508 facelift in early 2023 brought shouty new front-end styling, ’three-claw’ LED running lights and enhanced driver and infotainment displays, but it was all a case of too little too late for the PSE. It was removed from the range in the summer of 2024.
A sad story, but there’s a potentially happy ending for used buyers. The beauty of high-price, low-demand cars like the PSE is that depreciation steps in like a fairy godmother to make them attractive. The PSE has had a good sprinkling of that fairy dust, having lost half of its new value in three years. As we went to press with this story in late 2024, a 20,000-40,000 mile example from just about any production year was being advertised at between £27k and £30k.
Your biggest problem will be finding an SW PSE. Even if you’ve lost a couple of fingers in an unfortunate chainsaw accident you should still be able to use the remaining digits of that hand to count the number of cars on the UK used market at any one time. As we went to press you wouldn’t need any fingers at all to count them on PH Classifieds, because there were none.
If and when you do track one down, don’t let the car’s rarity scare you off haggling on the advertised price. Dealers with PSEs in stock, used or unused, have usually had them for a while, sometimes for up to a year or more. They will have already dropped their prices in some cases by up to 15 per cent in an effort to shift them but that shouldn’t stop you making a cheeky offer. Even at half the new price this is still a niche car with a limited number of potential buyers.
SPECIFICATION | Peugeot 508 SW PSE (2021-24)
Engine: 1,598cc inline four turbocharged petrol 16v + two electric motors
Transmission: 8-speed auto, all-wheel drive
Power (hp): 355@5,500rpm
Torque (lb ft): 384@1,650rpm
0-62mph (secs): 5.2
Top speed (mph): 155
Weight (kg): 1,875
MPG (WLTP): 139
CO2 (g/km, WLTP): 46
Wheels (in): 20
Tyres: 245/35
On sale: 2021 - 2024
Price new: £55,795
Price now: from £27,000
Note for reference: car weight and power data is hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.
ENGINE & GEARBOX
Peugeot’s 1.6 THP turbo four had been around for a while by the time the 508 PSE came to town. Peugeot’s PureTech adaptation for its plug-in hybrid models like the PSE could feel slightly crude against the best rivals from the likes of BMW, but in isolation it did the business and with a dash of noise augmentation it sounded OK too. Peugeot did a very good job of integrating it with the PSE’s electrical power source. The result was a well-judged, well-balanced mix of petrol and electricity.
The two electric motors positioned front and rear were rated at 81kW (109hp) + 236lb ft and 83kW (111hp) + 122lb ft respectively. The 11.8kWh (or 12.4kWh in the ’23 update) battery situated under the rear seats restricted the maximum combined output from the motors to 158hp. There was a claimed electric-only range of up to 26 miles (34 miles in the ’23-on cars) at speeds of up to 86mph. Real-world numbers in the pre-refresh cars were nearer to 20 miles in summer and under 15 miles in winter. Still, you could charge the battery from flat to full via a 3-pin plug in around seven hours, or in 1hr 45min through a 7.4kWh wall charger, giving the PSE a useful extra string to its bow for typical school run duties.
With the engine running, owners were reporting average fuel consumption figures of 40mpg and more. Irrespective of what revs the engine was at, the electric infill ensured gratifyingly prompt power delivery and impressive acceleration despite the car’s weight of nearly 1.9 tonnes. The Aisin EAT8 torque converter transmission that made its first appearance in Peugeots from 2017 had the capacity to fully disengage the PSE’s engine for EV driving, helping to reduce fuel consumption by up to (a claimed) 7 percent, but when the 1.6 engine was engaged the gearbox came across as less than stellar at serving up the right gear at the right moment. The problem was at its worst at low town speeds, and fiddling with the paddles didn’t really help.
Interestingly, the cost of Peugeot’s ‘fixed price’ servicing plan for the UK varies depending on where you live. If you’re in the Midlands or oop North the prices are typically £10-£30 lower than if you’re in the south of England. In the south, the cost of a year 1 interim service for a plug-in hybrid Peugeot is £289 or £359 for a year 2 main service. If we’re understanding it correctly no services are required for the PSE in years 3, 6 or 10. Services for years 4 and 8 are £405. All these prices were as published online at the end of 2024.
CHASSIS
Suspension was conventional MacPherson strut + coil front and multi-link rear but with three-mode (comfort, hybrid and sport) adaptive dampers and wider tracks front and rear than non-PSE 508s. There was extra negative camber too, a 4mm lower ride height and model-unique anti-roll bars.
As you’d expect, Comfort provided the softest ride but in the best old-school French tradition it was still firm enough for a sporting drive. The advantages of switching to Sport weren’t glaringly obvious, the cleverly-damped suspension doing a better job of soaking up the lumps and bumps when it wasn’t compromised by the overly stiff Sport settings and tempting drivers into ever-faster speeds on roads that they might have thought needed more circumspection. Even when you did eventually find the limit there was no snappiness. Everything was calm and composed. The only real shortcoming that we teased in the overview was the electric steering which, although quick, didn’t pass on all that much information from the road surface. Nevertheless most reviewers thought the Peugeot’s driving manners were superior to and more engaging than those of an Audi S4.
The PSE was all-wheel drive but there was no connection between the front and rear wheels. A gamut of drive modes included Electric which gave you up to 110hp through the rear wheels (for a short time anway). The others were the usual Comfort and Sport, augmented by Hybrid which chose the best power sources for the conditions and 4WD which gave you the best traction in bad conditions. Sport maxed up the regen to keep the battery topped up. If you dug deep enough you could find a way to disable the stability control and trigger some tail-happy fun – which was just about possible if you could overcome the grip provided by the AWD – but the car wouldn’t allow the ESC to be off for more than a few seconds.
Finding people to repair kerbed PSE alloys (20-inch Exxar two-tone diamond cut) could be difficult. Behind the alloys were Alcon brakes, 380mm ventilated discs at the front with four-piston calipers and solid rears with two-piston calipers. Rumour has it that replacement Alcon front discs – vaguely related to the ones used in Peugeot’s 206 World Rally Car – cost £1,000 a side. Just as well then that you could ease the burden on them by selecting one of two electronic braking modes. Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tyres were standard. They could seem a little noisy on some road surfaces and today you’ll find them quite pricey to replace in this size (245/35), Blackcircles quoting £242 a corner in December 2024. The only chassis-related recall we could find that might apply to the gen-2 508 was for certain rear suspension bolts not coming up to spec, but that was issued in 2020 so wouldn’t apply to the 2021-on SW PSE anyway.
BODYWORK
There were just three colour choices for the winglet-festooned, pillarless-doored PSE, none of which were actual colours by the common definition of that word. You could have Nera Black, Selenium Grey or Pearlescent White, not exactly trouser-ripping hues despite the dating-vulnerable lime ‘energy drink’ highlights, but good ones if you didn’t want to draw attention to the rate at which you were covering ground.
Hybrids generally lose out on cargo capacity but the PSE’s boot (bigger than the BMW 330e Touring at 530 litres with all the seats in use, 1,780 with the backs down) didn’t leave you feeling shortchanged. The electronically operated front seats could be dropped to a sportingly low position, which is what rear seat passengers needed to adopt to secure a bit more headroom in the heavily-raked rear body section. Legroom back there was excellent though.
A recall was put out in August ’21 to fix a 508 accessory roof rack which could detach from the car if it was used to carry items other than a roof box.
INTERIOR
Remember when we all took great delight in having a pop at the first tiny-steering-wheeled Peugeots, back in whenever that was? That design is starting to look quite prescient now as more cars come out with shallow-profile digital driver displays, with the days analogue clocks looking numbered in every sense. Peugeot reckoned the compact steering wheel that was a feature of the PSE’s i-Cockpit increased driving pleasure tenfold by offering unique agility and precision of movement. We’re not sure about tenfold, but it did promote a sensation of extra responsiveness on twisty roads and in terms of instrument visibility the setup in the PSE was mostly fine, just the bottom section of the 12.3-inch driver display being hidden from view once you’d grown accustomed to the feeling of a steering wheel in your lap.
Apple CarPlay and Android Auto were standard fit across the gen-two 508 range, as were automatic lights and wipers. The PSE had a lot of extra stuff on top which we detailed in the overview. The well-put-together, leathered-up and fresh-feeling cabin with its ‘kryptonite’ stitching (the same colour as that used for the brake calipers) added a touch of class, albeit perhaps not quite enough to give designers of the best German cars too many sleepless nights. For some reason, UK models didn’t have the ambient light strips on the dash that European market cars were given.
The Peugeot’s human-machine interface was generally good though the infotainment seemed a little dated. The FOCAL audio was excellent though and the ’23-on refresh brought noticeable improvements in the shape of a new 10-inch touchscreen with new i-Connect Advanced software, revised menus and sharper graphics. We think CarPlay and Android might have become wireless at that time too.
It’s best to do a good check on the cabin electrics of any used 508 you’re thinking of buying as they have had issues with infotainment, climate control and window operation. Keeping the 12v battery in rude health was important. Some owners reported losing the ability to switch radio channels, but this could usually be fixed by holding down the phone button until the infotainment reset itself. The keyless entry system sometimes kept you waiting a while before grudgingly opening the doors.
PH VERDICT
We mentioned the gen-two 508’s pleasing visual similarity to the classic 505 saloon. There was no such similarity in their lifespans. The 505 started life in the late '70s and was still being knocked out in factories outside France well into the '00s. With just three years under its belt from start to finish the 508 PSE was a veritable mayfly.
The part of the 505 experience that the PSE brought right up to date was the fluidity and compliance of the chassis, fully updated for the 21st century and still fully functional even with considerably more horsepower coursing through it. Where the PSE failed was in not knowing its place in the market, or rather, in Peugeot’s over-estimation of where its improvements in build quality had taken the brand. Their cars hadn’t reached BMW standards in many key areas and yet they were expecting buyers to pay BMW money-plus for them. You certainly needed to be a fully paid-up member of the Peugeot fan club to go in for a £55k PSE when you could get a lighter and faster (albeit non hybrid) BMW M340i for £3k less. Having said all that, if you did go down the PSE road you would most likely be very pleased by your purchase, or lease if you could justify the burly monthly outlay of over £900 a month.
If you paid cash you might not have been quite so pleased to see the value melting away. Depreciation is a great leveller and the PSE makes a whole lot more sense in the used market. That’s where you can enjoy all of its character and performance for considerably smaller, dare we say sensible, amounts of cash, reassured by the 508’s good reliability record.
Sadly we can’t point you towards any PSEs for sale on PH Classifieds as of December 2024 but they are out there if you look hard enough. One of the SW’s rivals is the Volkswagen Arteon R, an equally handsome all-wheel drive 300hp+ estate that was even shorter-lived (2012-23) than the Peugeot and that can be picked up for prices starting at £25,000. If you want to read all about that, fill your boots here. Alternatively you could get a 20,000 mile BMW 330e M Sport Touring for around £29,000.
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