It's called the 307 but, as Peugeot insists, it is "not just a number". Advertisements in magazines for this cheerful new hatchback fearlessly promote it as the choice of individualists - or, more interestingly, as the choice of people who conform, but not completely.
In one of the advertisements, a bloke in an untucked T-shirt and his 30s grins out at us beside the phrase, "25 year mortgage. 2 seater buggy in the hall. 2oz of anniversary caviar in air-conditioned glove box". (It's true: the glove box on the 307 is air-conditioned. Which is good news for the temperature of your caviar, and also for the temperature of the other things that may end up in there more permanently, such as your logbook and your broken cassette boxes.)
In another advertisement in the same series, a woman, similarly alleged to be involved with children and a mortgage, is nevertheless wearing a cowboy hat. Just for the record, the 307 is the tallest car in its class. You could wear a cowboy hat while driving it - possibly even a busby. But I don't think that's the point the advertisement is trying to make. What Peugeot seems to be saying is that the 307 driver, though up to his or her knees in toddlers and debt, is still goddamned funky enough to want a hatchback with a sharply bevelled edge at the back and one of those sprouty, go-faster aerials.
The car does look pretty sharp; but it's also very functional and may possibly be a bit of a stickler at heart. It's easy and comfortable to drive, rather than characterful and hair-raising. In an extremely sensible way, it imports safety features from Peugeot's impressively grown-up saloon, the 607. In bored moments in a traffic jam, you could play hunt the airbag. Apparently there are six in all. I never got to find out, but following a shunt the car must resemble one of those over-draped bedrooms that Homes & Gardens is fond of.
Also, slam on the brakes and the hazard lights come on automatically, to let your fellow road-users know that you are braking or, as it may be, panicking like crazy. How funky is that?
Another grown-up thing about the 307: it majors on "storage solutions". With the exception, possibly, of some of your larger white goods, the 307 offers a specially moulded rack, shelf or pot for everything you own. Passengers in the rear can wedge their sweet wrappers in the aeroplane-style seat-back magazine holders. There are hooks for shopping bags and clothing. There's a stowage tray under your seat, which would prove handy for maps or a sick bag or, perhaps, a small coin collection. There is a large hatch mounted in the roof just above the rear-view mirror that looks like it might conceal, at the very least, the controls for a rocket launcher. When you open it, you realise it's a holder for sunglasses.
The car stops just short of supplying a carousel for videos and a spice rack. The 307 seems to imagine motoring as an organisational nightmare, overaccessorised and involving a surprising amount of food. In my experience, it's not wrong.
I would quibble only with the driver's drinks holder. A series of exacting tests in a variety of on-road situations revealed that with a medium-sized milkshake in there you can't let the handbrake off - at least not without squeezing the container from the side and causing chocolate to fountain on to your trouser leg. Clearly, a major design oversight has taken place when the mispositioning of the handbrake interferes with the smooth operation of a car's drinks holder.
More generally, you can't fault the 307's provision of space. Unfortunately, most of that space seems to be between the top of the dashboard and the foot of the windscreen. As you drive, a Montana-scale acreage of plastic lies permanently to the north, beyond your steering wheel, much of it cream-coloured in the version I drove. (You wouldn't have to have the cream: the 307 offers, mind-bogglingly, 79 different combinations of interior finish, the majority of them, in fact, entirely cream-free.) Except as an impromptu bunk bed, it's not clear what purpose this space serves.
Still, even carrying this excess frontal chamber around, a diesel version of this car should guarantee you more than 60 miles per gallon on a long journey. Altogether, this is Peugeot's "most environmentally friendly car". The concept of an environmentally friendly car is, obviously, hedged about with contradictions, but, essentially, more than 90% of the 307's weight can be recycled at the end of the car's life - when, presumably, the salvaged materials can be put to use again in the depletion of the environment.
Also, to ease the deconstruction of the car once it has been junked, much of it has been put together using a device which Peugeot refers to as the "plasti-rivet". The plasti-rivet isn't mentioned in any of the adverts, even the one with the woman in the cowboy hat. "25 year mortgage. 2 seater buggy in the hall. Car that makes use of innovative plasti-rivets." I suppose it doesn't quite sing, as they say in advertising.
