We collected it with mere delivery kays on the odo, and in the past three months the 5008 has clocked up 3800km of trouble-free motoring. While the Peugeot brand isn’t one that instantly springs to mind when thinking of bulletproof dependability, the firm recently topped a JD Power Vehicle Dependability Study in the UK.
It found Peugeot to be the maker of the vehicles with the fewest problems experienced by owners. The study, which is based on the responses of 11,530 owners of new cars registered from November 2015 to January 2018, measured the number of problems experienced per 100 vehicles, with a lower score indicating better performance.
Peugeot came out on top with a score of 77, while the industry average was 119. And of course you’ll want to know which company came out worst of all, and that was BMW with a score of 181.
Along with a distinct lack of warning lights going off or return to dealership messages, the 5008’s interior has held up well. Most of the kid’s sticky paw prints have been easy enough to remove from the surfaces, including the flash-looking Alcantara-clad upholstery. Some have been surprised to learn the 5008 is a seven seater, as they reckon it doesn’t look big enough from the outside.
It indeed looked diminutive next to the monstrous Infiniti QX80 parked on the driveway recently. Yet the kids found there’s enough space in the third row for their small legs, provided the second row is slid forward a smidge to accommodate them better. We folded the middle seat in the second row flat which both provides easier access to the rear and allows the kids to stretch their legs out lounge like when seated in the back row.
The 5008 is one of the few cars on the market with three Isofix points across the second row. With three individual seats and decent cabin width, you can actually fit three child restraints across without them being squeezed too tightly together. The third row seats can be a tad fiddly to pull out and stow away again, which is largely to do with the boot floor.
On most other seven seaters, the boot floor and the seat back are one in the same, making deployment a simple, one-handed movement. Here you first have to work out how to fold the floor over, then awkwardly pull the seat up. The one positive of the set-up is that you can remove the boot floor and shake all the muck off it, said debris landing outside of the car.
For whatever reason, Peugeot designed the third row seats to be removable, though we can’t see the benefit of this as removing them doesn’t free up more boot storage. It does however make cleaning up any mess that falls between the seats easier.
Boot space is one thing the 5008 is not lacking when those rear seats are stowed. It has a low-set floor, and a wide opening so you can load up whatever you like. Just mind your head on the tailgate for it hangs a little low if you’re taller than average. We could get the kids’ bikes in the boot easily, and after folding all the seats flat, we carried a full-size adult’s bicycle home too, without the need to remove its front wheel. So it’s a genuinely spacious mobile.
Other aspects we quite like include a good turning circle, and tyres with enough of a sidewall to fend off brushes with the curb. While the front brakes generate a bit of brake dust, the alloys are both easy to clean and the design wears the dust well. You don’t really notice how dirty they are until you polish them up.
And so too the colour of this 5008, the Nimbus Grey hue disguising the road grime well. As for fuel use, that settled on a long term average of 8.7L/100km. If your routine involves mainly stop and start urban running, and lots of short trips, figure on usage around the 10L/100km zone, while more motorway miles will see it drift closer to that eight-litre mark.
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