2003 Peugeot 206 GTi 180 from UK and Ireland - Comments

Electrical faults.

180 owners love this car. People who have test driven it hate it.

Like many have said, you learn to drive it quick.

I have had my 180 from new, not changed it, but spent on it Performance Exhaust, Chipped Ecu, Induction Kit, Full SP Kit, Momo GTR Alloys, De Badged Front Grill. Must have spent over £3000 on it.

Before it was quick when driven right. Now it is just awesome; 220bhp last time tested on rolling road. Type R, Cooper S, Clio 182, not even close.

Look at the interior of a 182 Clio; my god, I have seen Saxos with better interiors. So as my number plate says, Japanese CARS SUCK!

LOL, you do realise that Peugeot pushed that engine to the limit to get 180bhp. I'm a Peugeot mechanic and they had so many engine failures trying to push this engine, so with an exhaust and chip you think you have gained 40hp... but it's not the case! I have driven loads of these, and they are too heavy and understeer, and just too slow.

The engine in the GTi 180 is the Sport Clio 182 unit, which means it is reliable. I've had two 172's (the same engine with a different manifold and fuel map) and a highly modified 182 with throttle bodies and cams on 98k miles, the other two had similar miles in standard form, and you know what? Not one failure on any of them, even the modified one with 260bhp, I modified that at 93k miles as well, so to say they're not very good is totally incorrect.

As for 40 bhp from a chip, not really likely, I think my modified 182 got around 15 bhp just from a chip before the throttle bodies went on, then it went much higher.

They are hard engines to extract power from with just bolt on parts, but proper bits like cams etc. really do turn the engine into a monster (reliable too). Great track car the Clio, but the 206 is a bit heavy for the engine to be as enjoyable.

Actually the engine in the Clio 182 and the engine in the Pug are completely different. You're thinking they share engines, but they don't. It's Peugeot and Citroen that sometimes share engines, not Renault.

For the Pug Mechanic... the engine is almost unbreakable... to gain 40 hp easy... the engine is shared with the Citroen C4. The 130KW version and was developed by Lotus... the engine can do much more than 180 HP if tuned right and slow my @$$... check track times and you will see.

So you think you can gain 40hp with a chip and exhaust system on a not very good 2 litre engine???

These engines are far from unbreakable, they had lots of issues in coming up with this engine with overheating especially. This was before they came into production though, so in standard form they are OK, but seriously apart from the usual compromises that every car manufacturer makes to cost, noise levels, reliability and fuel economy, this engine is nothing special. In fact every review of them compared to its competition places it last!!

Peugeot delayed the launch of this engine time and time again, the reason?... they kept snapping crankshafts!

That's unheard of in an engine only producing 180bhp.

This is just a standard gti engine modified to produce the higher bhp figure, which is why it's on the limit of its capabilities already.

Engine was detuned to 180bhp at the fly because of snapping of the crankshafts, it will take more. Quite a few muddled facts on here.

Even if that were true and they were aiming for say 200bhp, but like you say they detuned it to 180 bhp to keep from snapping crankshafts, do you really think these engines can take much more if they start breaking at 200bhp? I think not.

I own a 180, had it for over half a year now after upgrading from a 1.6 8v Pug. In its standard form it is pretty slow going!

I took it to my local tuning centre, and the rolling road produced 168bhp and only 140lb/ft of torque at the flywheel. The car came with a Powerflow exhaust.

Apparently, most of the 180's are between 165-170bhp standard. Peugeot actually quote 174bhp (130kW) standard for this engine so it's not 180bhp.

We added a special made induction kit designed for the car and mapped it twice. It made runs of 186hp and 187hp with 162lb/ft and 164lb/ft of torque respectively. This is quite a large increase and highlights perhaps that Peugeot have indeed downtuned the engine.

After the second map a few months later, we RR the car again and this time the results were very confusing.

First run: 200.1hp, 173lb/ft

Second Run: 198hp, 171lb/ft.

Third run: 191hp, 170lb/ft.

I'd rather take the smaller figures, but at 190hp in a car that weighs a mere 1100kg, it shifts like no ones business! Beats the Clio 182 (apparently 179hp standard although never makes this figure), Civic Type R (higher torque than Civic, so the Civic keeps up and then drops back again). I held the RX8 to about 50mph where it slowly started pulling away...

The engine can easily make more power. The 207 S2000 has the same block and makes 280hp. We are looking at redesigning the exhaust and manifold system to reach a constant 200hp...

A customer came into my workshop asking to tune up a EW10 J4 S (GTi 180 engine). We tested the engine and it was producing 177.4bhp standard (every engine produces a different amount of power due to wear and tear, air temp, air quality, fuel quality, oil quality, spark plug condition, high altitude and so on).

The engine block is almost the same as the standard GTi block. The crank is more fine balanced (oh and by the way, it's a very strong crankshaft so if you manage to break one, you just can't drive). The head is almost the same as the Honda Type-R head (200bhp) with a vvt inlet camshaft. The head is also ported and polished with the valves seated better. It has a tuned inlet tuned by Alutech for better flow with a huge throttle body (bigger than some high performance cars e.g Toyota Supra, Nissan Skyline), and an oil cooling system is also integrated into the inlet manifold (very good cooling system on this engine) cold air is passed over the oil cooler tank. The exhaust manifold is a 4-2-1 system.

The GTi 180 engine runs very well on a stand alone management system, producing around 240bhp. With other modifications, this car WILL produce max 297bhp aspirated and was done by me and my company. The engine I built was used in the 207 2008 WRC rally car. This engine is one of the hundreds of engines I have had pleasure building.

In all this engine is one of the best 2.0L aspirated engine out there today, alongside with the Honda's Type-R engine.

Oh and people who think the 206 understeers, try letting off the power, it will then oversteer. 25 years of tuning shows you that. =)