When I managed, a couple of weeks ago, to clap eyes on the new SR1 concept car in the inner sanctum of Peugeot’s design centre just outside Paris, it wasn’t so much the car’s Aston-like profile that delivered the shock. It was the scale of the company’s ambition for its future designs.
Here was a car, unrecognisable as a Peugeot except in the broadest terms, which both of the company’s design bosses - PSA group chief Jean-Pierre Ploue and newly appointed Peugeot design head Gilles Vidal - reckoned was a reliable guide to the design features and philosophy we’ll see applied to much more prosaic Peugeot models of the future. Starting, evidently, with the 207 replacement (probably to be called 208, though it’s not absolutely certain) we’ll see in 2011.