Keep smiling
The Peugeot 207 may not have been the strongest piece of design Peugeot has ever shown, but the French were quite convinced of the lines. With the facelift there was no huge metamorphosis, although there were some changes in the eye.
With the 206 Peugeot experienced times like never before, because even the very successful 205 was far surpassed in the sales figures. Try to design a successor for such a sales stunner. The 206 had sharply shaped headlights and a subtle ‘smile’ underneath, the designers put the magnifying glass on the 207. It got really huge light units for its size, accompanied by a grille that was also not for the cat.
Although you could see from the 207 that the 206 was his ancestor, the subtlety of the 206 design had given way to a line pattern that was labeled by critics as clumsy. In any case, Peugeot followed the design direction with the 207 that it had taken with the facelifted 307 and the then still fairly new 407. The beginning of a period in which the sleeker and more subtle forms of the 306 and 406 were definitively a thing of the past and Peugeots became driving design statements.
The 207 not only looked significantly bigger than its predecessor thanks to the large ‘mouth’ on it, it was also actually a bit bigger. The wheelbase grew by 10 cm and the 207 as a whole was even 21 cm longer than the 206. In width the difference was almost 10 cm. It made the 207 a spacious car, but also one that was also not to be missed that it was no longer as light-footed as its predecessor.
With the facelift in 2009, Peugeot broadly continued what it had started in 2006. That meant that the 207 could keep its big smile, only the French sharpened it a bit. The grille became a bit more angular in shape on the sides at the bottom. The black trim in the grille was also slightly less eye-catching and from now on there were only horizontal bars in the grille. Also, the fog lamps (on the versions that had them) moved to newly formed openings in the front bumper. At the rear, Peugeot took a more conservative approach. There you will now find slightly modified rear lights, in which the reversing and turn signals are no longer behind red but behind colorless glass.
Peugeot 207 facelift
Although the design of the 207 was certainly not Peugeot’s strongest, the 207 sold quite well. Globally, at least. In the Netherlands we were clearly less charmed by it than by its two predecessors. While 142,000 of the 205 were sold in the Netherlands and even 153,000 of the 206, the 207 ‘only’ left the showroom about 57,000 times.
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl