| 200 Years Of Peugeot | ||
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(Fri 08 Jan 10) Yes, it does seem odd that a car manufacturer is celebrating its bicentenary already, when it's widely accepted that the motor car was only invented in 1885. But Peugeot has always been about more than cars - it is also a leading maker of such diverse objects as, for example, bicycles and pepper mills.
The company dates itself back to 1810 on the basis that that was the year when Jean-Pierre and Jean-Frédéric Peugeot converted their father's cereal mill into a steel foundry. The famous Lion badge was introduced in 1858, and to celebrate its 200 years as an industrial concern Peugeot has had the logo redesigned, as shown above. It has also created a new catchphrase, Motion & Emotion, which will presumably be used to the same extent as Audi's Vorsprung durch Technik, Citroen's Créative Technologie, Mazda's Zoom-Zoom, and so on. The first production car to wear the new badge will be the RCZ sports car, which will come on the market this spring. The RCZ is quite dramatic, but no more so than Peugeot's SR1 concept (pictured below).
The SR1 will be officially unveiled at the Geneva Show in March, partly to show off the Hybrid4 system which in this case consists of a 1.6-litre petrol turbo engine driving the front wheels and an electric motor driving the rears. When both are operating at full strength the SR1 becomes a four-wheel drive vehicle developing a maximum of 313bhp, though of course it can also be driven on battery power alone for short distances. Hybrid4 will go on sale for the first time in a slightly different form in 2011, when Peugeot will introduce the world's first production diesel/electric vehicle based on the 3008. A plug-in version (which can be recharged with mains electricity) will follow a year later, and has target figures of 141mpg combined fuel economy and CO2 emissions below 50g/km. Comment on this story on Facebook or Twitter. |
