Price:
£26 700 (about R291 000)
Performance:
Maximum speed 242km/h, 0-100km/h 8.4sec
Combined fuel economy:
10.3 litres/100km
Given all the majestic, noble creatures to choose from in the animal kingdom, who would base their corporate image on the face of a basking shark? Peugeot, that's who, and this is the latest car to carry this fearful, gaping visage: the new 407 coupé.
Basking sharks are one thing but of all the animal species the human race must be the most peculiar. We eat rabbits, but not cats; millions find Adam Sandler amusing; odder still, we seem prepared to pay more for cars with two doors than for those with four.
The 407 coupé, which is of course based on the 407 sedan, costs a lot more than an equivalent four-door yet does nothing that the saloon can't do and even falls short in several other areas: most notably, number of doors.
Because it has only two doors, yet still has an (actually very spacious) rear seat, the doors need to be absurdly long, which means they are also very heavy.
Worse, they need to be opened to an impractically wide degree to allow access to the front seats, which means you can forget all about the narrow bays of modern multi-storey car parks.
Usually, the saving grace of this kind of car is its looks. The last Peugeot coupé, the 406, was notably gorgeous, but even here the 407 coupé blunders. It is tidy enough from the rear (and so was the Ferrari 355 it blatantly copies) but from the front it is really quite frightening, with a gigantic front overhang and, of course, that gaping gob.
This car has a bigger underbite than Keira Knightly. Side-on, there are strong echoes of the Ford Cougar and look where they've put the wing mirrors!
It's as if they've been stuck on during some drunken pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game.
You may have read in my review of the Peugeot 1007 the other week that I've been having problems getting hold of Peugeots. It seems that the company is a little fed up with all the nasty things I keep saying about its cars, to the extent that there were strong hints that I was about to be banned from testing them altogether.
In fact, before I drove the 407 coupé, I was quite ready to enforce my own unilateral ban. I'd had it with Peugeots - doing all these wretched write-ups was tarnishing my soul and I wanted no more of it.
Longer than a riverboat
Then I drove the coupé and, well, I still wasn't very impressed. This is not a wieldy car by any means; not only is it longer than a riverboat, but it steers like one too, and - as with the execrable 407 saloon I tried last year - the manual gear-change is one of the worst of any car on sale today.
It's quiet and refined, I'll give it that. Cabin noise was limited to a little tyre rumble and my own intermittent tutting. Superficially, it feels like a £30 000 car, but then the passenger door refused to close a few times, the petrol flap release wouldn't open, and I began to suspect that the 407 coupé will soon be sinking to the lower ranges of customer satisfaction surveys, along with the rest of Peugeot's range.
Similarly bottom-bound are residual values as, astonishingly, if you specify a 407 coupé with the best engine in the range, the V6 diesel, it does cost more than £30 000.
I imagine anyone thinking about a BMW 3 Series coupé or even a Mazda RX-8 who hears this will be left gasping like a beached basking shark in disbelief. - The Independent, London