Agent47 Posted September 21, 2020 Posted September 21, 2020 Heard the one about French cars and electronics? The punchline for me was that, after refuelling, I restarted the 2008 and it presented messages about the active cruise control and lane-keeping, illuminated a spanner icon and set the sat-nav to a nearby Peugeot garage. The front radar panel looked clean and all was fine again when I drove that evening. What are you missing most from your normal life? Meeting people, eating in restaurants, cheering on your football team, going abroad or even just existing without needing to stress about keeping ‘one metre plus’ from others, perhaps. Your commute? Unlikely, but I’m yearning for regular driving nearly as much as those other things. And I miss those terribly. My normal daily drive is a 140-mile round trip from the Sussex coast to work in Middlesex and back. And it has now been six months since I’ve visited a petrol station, for heaven’s sake. This meant that a reason for a visit to the office (I had run out of material for Autocar’s two archive columns, having gathered back in late February what I thought would be more than enough to outlast the closure…) was received with delight. Such little opportunity for driving means the 2008 still feels weird to sit in, with its low, oddly shaped little steering wheel, but I know that I must force myself to not endlessly fiddle with the seat and wheel positioning. What I have been experimenting with is the i-Cockpit screen (only while stationary, I ought to add), which offers several viewing modes, selected via a roller on the wheel. I had used Navigation the last time I had driven, having the sat-nav map as the priority and the speed tucked away to the right. But for a motorway drive I know off by heart, I settled on Dials, which verges on conventional. Another mode is Driving, which shows a 3D digital model of the 2008 within its lane and highlights either edge in orange if the lane-keeping assistance system detects that you’re straying too far from the centre, before it intervenes with the wheel. I don’t really understand why you would need this, but then I really don’t understand why anyone is unable to hold a car within a lane… There are also two Personal modes, allowing you to pick what you want to appear on either side of the screen via a menu in the central touchscreen. It took me several minutes to work out that this is how you view the 2008’s self-calculated MPG figure: you have to choose the trip computer as one of the custom viewing modes, else the only efficiency information you’re presented with is predicted range.
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