It has taken South Africans a while to warm up to the charms of the Citroen C1/Peugeot 107 twins, but they’ve arguably never made more sense than now… Well-specified, economical and fun to drive, they also offer a bit more flair than most of their price rivals.
Last year Citroen’s C1 actually emerged victorious in the budget segment of our Top 12 awards, and it remains to be seen whether it can repeat its upset victory. One of the cars standing in its way could actually be its twin, Peugeot’s little 107. I recently spent some time in the 107 Urban.
There is no other way to describe the look of this car other than cute. After its facelift last year the car’s revised front end has taken on a sort of eager smiley face… with braces.
The cabin is predictably a tight squeeze for larger passengers, but it suited me (and average-sized friends) just fine. It is fairly basic at this price leve, so everything in this car is manually operated – from the windows to the mirrors to locking the doors. Moving up a spec level to Trendy gets you electric windows for the front occupants as well as central locking.
With a 50 kW 1,0-litre engine, the 107 does not seem to have much oomph on paper, but it sure is fun. The thing about small cars with small engines is that they generally thrive on being driven hard. So you rev the engine and you thrash the gears a bit. At the end of the day what you get is a really fun driving experience. It’s not totally refined and it doesn’t inspire much confidence for overtaking manoeuvres, but it’s light and zippy and ideally suited to city driving. It’s also very frugal, with a CAR Fuel Index figure of only 5,4 litres/100 km.
The 107 is light, so the handling feels playful. You can push it into corners, but I felt that I needed to step on the brakes earlier than I usually would because leaving it too late unsettled it (and me) a bit. The suspension set-up makes for an acceptable level of comfort, but some uneven surfaces do make themselves felt in the cabin, though. There is a significant amount of wind and engine noise, and on rough surfaces, the tyre noise is quite apparent too.
I purposefully chose the smallest bays when parallel parking the 107. Thanks to its size and power steering, this exercise was a breeze. On the subject of breezes, the unsettling part of my time with the 107 was when Cape Town was experiencing a particularly windy weekend I had lots of wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the little hatch in my chosen lane.
All in all, the Peugeot 107 is a very basic car that offers little in terms of “luxury” comfort or convenience features – the CD player isn’t even MP3 compatible, so I had to dust off a few of my music albums. It does offer good safety spec, though, with four airbags and ABS being included. At just over R110 000 it is a fun and funky car for day-to-day driving and offers some smile factor. Soon, however, it won’t only have to battle more spacious cars such as the VW Polo Vivo and Ford Figo, but also it’s missing triplet, the Toyota Aygo. That’s right… soon to be launched in SA, the Aygo could cause an upset in this segment as it offers all the plusses of the C1/107, but without the perceived minusses – lack of service network, expensive maintenance etc.
