Tax man’s toy
It seems like an eternity ago that the Peugeot 308 was voted Car of the Year. Still, that’s not too bad: exactly ten years old, with 307 points, well ahead of the BMW i3 and Tesla Model S. In our country it was mainly known as a toy for the tax authorities. What about that addition again?
Last decade there was a real cat-and-mouse game going on between car importers and the tax authorities. It was the time when many French Peugeot employees were talking about that curious concept of addition, which in the Netherlands was decisive for the difference between profit and loss. A gram more or less emissions meant the difference between long delivery times for the most popular boys in class and a role as a shop assistant in sad parking lots full of unsellable material. At Peugeot, the new 308 had barely appeared in public when the fourteen percent promises were already rolling over the sales table. And as soon as The Hague turned on the subsidy tap and allowed even fewer emissions, the importer (and many colleagues) countered this by demanding even stricter specifications from the factory for that one diesel engine.
The 308 SW illustrates this beautifully: as a 1.6 BlueHDi, with its emissions of 85 g/km, it ignored the fact that the tax authorities had increased the emissions by 14 percent to 83 g/km on January 1, 2015. But don’t worry: in March of that year, Peugeot Netherlands was proud to announce that the same 308 SW had managed to emit exactly 82 g/km from now on. The hatchback still met that standard at the time, which led to the 308 leaving the showroom more than 29,000 times that year; With a 6.4 percent market share, Peugeot’s mid-range car would become the top seller of 2015 by a huge margin. That storm had already arrived the year before (14,400 cars and 3.7 percent), while in 2016 everything was radically different: a paltry 5,000 cars and only 1.3 percent! Bizarre differences, which painfully illustrated the bankruptcy of the addition phenomenon at the time.
Apart from these vicissitudes: the 308 was a delight with its 300 Nm strong diesel engine, and not only because of its practical consumption of 1 in 21 and, with a tank capacity of 53 liters, a range of 1,100 kilometers. Figures that the new e-308 can only dream of, although you may question their relevance. But favorable addition still applies to this electric descendant.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl