2004 Peugeot 206 XSi SW review from UK and Ireland

Usual dodgy French car build quality. Squeaks, rattles and poorly fitting trim within about 1500 miles. Radio/computer display can be moved about 3cm in each direction within its housing and the back seat has rattled from day one. You learn to live with it.

Banging from front suspension which cured itself by the time the dealer could fit the car in. Has never returned.

Dash sometimes does odd things when you turn the engine off. The dials jump about for a few seconds and the radio won't turn off. This has happened twice now, but nobody seems to know what's causing it.

Apart from poor quality and useless dealers, it's been a great little car. The 110 PS engine gives lively performance (0-60 in 9.4 seconds) and it loves to rev too.

As you might expect from a Peugeot, the handling is very good with the XSi suspension giving a taut ride and great body control. It doesn't seem to have quite the same beautiful ride quality as a lot of earlier "performance" Pugs though, and the steering is much lighter than I remember in the 306 XSi or 205 GTI. While I'm in whinge mode, the brakes are also stupidly over-servoed making heel and toe downchanges nigh on impossible. Brush the pedal and you stand the car on its nose.

The driving position feels odd at first, but there's plenty of adjustment on the (excellent) seats and wheel. I don't like the way the coupling for the steering column sometimes rubs the top of my clutch foot though, and to call the dash plastics cheap looking is an understatement. LHD wipers and the ridiculous system that automatically turns on the hazard lights on hard braking (if you can't be trusted to operate hazard lights correctly, should you really be driving?) wind me up a bit, but overall it's quite an easy car to live with.

Overall though, a nippy, enjoyable small estate car with a decent turn of speed, a great engine, and just enough of the traditional Pug magic in the handling department to set it aside from the majority of the competition. If it didn't need to go to Peugeot dealers for servicing and they could stretch the interior plastics budget above the current level of about three quid, it would be very hard to fault in context of its price and target market.