The big deal with Peugeot's all-new run-about, the 1007, is its automatic sliding doors. They represent a major talking point and quite a breakthrough in a small car. Indeed, when any kind of vehicle offers this facility as standard, you tend to remember it. Think of Chrysler's brick-shaped people carrier, the Grand Voyager, for instance, or the Starship Enterprise.
True, the sliding doors on the 1007 don't go "fish" like the ones on the Enterprise. Indeed, they take about five seconds to pop out and trundle back fully, and do so with a low rumble, accompanied by a gentle but insistently repeating alarm sound, alerting all occupants and close-up bystanders that half the side of the car is about to come off and disappear away towards the back end. (You can see how it's the kind of thing you would be grateful to be warned about.)
But the mechanism is no less impressive for that, and it makes the 1007 unusually road-smart and accessible, in a way that owners of milk floats will immediately recognise. The chief drawback with most miniature urban cars is the number of horizontal lines along which you have to crease yourself before getting into them.
By contrast, it ought to be possible for a person of average build to walk into the driving seat of a 1007 almost without breaking stride. The doors go back so far, they almost function as back doors, too. At any rate, small children who are not obese can slip behind the front seats and into the two-seater rear cabin without having to do any tipping or tilting.
What's more, not having to allow for door clearance brightly opens up those inconveniently narrow spaces one often finds oneself obliged to occupy and which haven't necessarily been made with parking in mind, such as the bays in an airport's long-stay car park. Sliding doors also eliminate those regrettable door-to-cyclist coincidences that can make urban road use such a mutually knuckle-whitening experience. Or maybe eliminate is too strong. But frankly, if you take down a cyclist with the leading edge of a door on the 1007, then you're going to have a pretty strong argument that they were too close.
Even in 2005, it feels curiously amusing and futuristic to be pressing the button on a fob and watching a car's doors open. After the profoundly enriching drama of this build-up, you sit behind the wheel imbued with the fearlessly questing spirit of the astronaut and imagine you ought to be bursting into orbit and praying that the heat-resistant tiles hold. It is, accordingly, something of a letdown to find yourself inside a mere car and bound for the new Krispy Kreme doughnuts outlet off the A3 at Shannon's Corner. (That said, the immediate effects of consuming more than three Krispy Kreme doughnuts within a short space of time are believed to replicate faithfully some, if not all, of the sensations of a perilous re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, no matter what you're driving).
Still, Peugeot does its best to compensate for your disappointment by keeping things in the interior quietly funky, but always simple and practical. And thanks to Peugeot's Cameleo system, you need never tire of the colour scheme. You can buy a set of fascia mats, seat covers and door panels in one of 12 colours that, via a simple toolless system of poppers and zippers, transforms the interior according to your mood. Thus do the principles of the snap-on mobile phone fascia find an application in the world of the car.
The disappointment is the 2-Tronic gearbox, an automatic system with a clutchless manual override which, in automatic mode, is as lurchy as a rodeo steer with a wasp in its ear and becomes even more so if you try to control the gear changes yourself (by pushing the gearshift in the direction of the plus or minus signs, or with the paddles behind the steering wheel). Let's just say it takes some getting used to.
It should also be noted that, as miracles of compression go, the 1007 is not all that small. It may look like the point where a friction toy meets a Smart car, but it's a mini in the truly modern sense - ie, it's what we used to think of as a parcel-delivery van. And beside a Nissan Micra, a 1007 is a pretty big lump of metal. Moreover, it's a lump of metal into which you will be able to fit next to no baggage, assuming that you fill the seats with humans.
On the other hand, if you have little in the way of human cargo, the 1007 is furiously adaptable, its seats being ready to collapse or come right out, according to your desires. You can strip it down to a one-seater car if you wish, though the question of your own driving comfort and the fulfilment of key safety criteria insist that you go no further than that. Although it would mean you would have two sliding doors all to yourself. How cool is that?
The lowdown
Peugeot 1007 1.6 litre Dolce
Price: £11,850
Top speed: 117mph
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 11.8 secs
Consumption: 42.8mpg (combined)
At the wheel: Captain Kirk
On the stereo: Fanfare for the Common Man
En route for: Sector Seven
