New Peugeot 107 Access Special Offers

The Peugeot 107 has been given a nip, a tuck and a few engineering revisions to ensure it remains one of the premier city car picks. Andy Enright reports

The Peugeot 107 range comprises both three and five-door city cars all powered by the same 1.0-litre three-cylinder petrol engine. It's now better looking than before and the best news of all is that emissions drop to under 100g/km which means free road tax. Cheap insurance and improved fuel economy also a big draw.

With hindsight it should have been obvious that Peugeot had a winner on its hands with the 107. Small, well built and attractively priced, the 107 was launched alongside its sister vehicles, the Citroen C1 and the Toyota Aygo, The marketing propositions of the latter cars were easy to grasp. The Citroen was the budget choice and the Aygo the premium model. The 107's reasoning seemed a little woollier but UK buyers flocked to it, preferring the Peugeot badge to Citroen's and also due to some heavy discounts and attractive finance deals. It's been one of our go-to city car recommendations ever since.

Times have changed, however, and recent emissions legislation and the influx of increasingly excellent Korean city cars has seen the 107's position challenged. Unwilling to cede this important market, Peugeot has responded in kind with an updated version of its appealing urban scoot.

Although Peugeot has tweaked the efficiency of the 1.0-litre three-cylinder petrol engine found under the bonnet of the 107, it's otherwise much the same as before. Not that there was anything wrong with that as it remains one of the most characterful small car engines around. Offer it a good prod of right foot and you'll see 60mph come and go in 14 seconds which might sound glacial but will feel a good deal more effervescent. You'll need to work to keep give the 68bhp powerplant on the boil on motorway inclines though.

The latest car doesn't diverge too far from the original in terms of suspension setup. The 107 is short and tall, but you could always push the car very hard without it feeling top heavy. There's only so much the chassis designers could do regarding suspension comfort in a car with such a short wheelbase but you can forgive it the odd bump and thump in cities in return for excellent manoeuvrability and the opportunity to sidle into parking bays where most other cars would register a refusal.

Thankfully Peugeot has emerged from that phase where many of its cars had a face that resembled a daydreaming basking shark and the latest 107 is possibly a more handsome car than the original. The restyled 107 is instantly recognisable by the changes to the car's front styling, with a deeper lower front panel with a housing for the front fog lights, LED daytime running lights and a redesigned front bumper.

The design brief for the 107 was to engineer a compact car with a cheeky character that would appeal to young drivers, be versatile in use and, above all, be totally at ease in the urban environment. The length of the car wasn't to exceed 3.5 metres, yet a whole host of safety features needed to be included, as well as enough wheelbase to accommodate the popular five-door body style. The 107 features some neat design touches too. The glazed-in area surrounding the rear window is finished in black, giving it a very distinctive rump, especially when the car is painted in paler colours.

Pricing remains very reasonable although the trim structure has changed. Out go the old Urban Lite and Urban badges and in come a trio of trims dubbed Access, Active and Allure that bring it in line with other Peugeot model line ups. Within these trim levels, features such as Peugeot Connect Bluetooth, USB and LED daytime running lights are now available for the first time on the 107 range. In addition to the additional optional gear, the restyled range also offers better equipment across the range with air conditioning now standard on Active level versions, and alloy wheels, rev counter, Peugeot Connect Bluetooth and USB standard on Allure level versions. The asking prices have inevitably crept up a little but the entry level car weighs in at around £8,000, which is very combative in the city car sector.

Surprisingly for such a small car, it is the five-door version (with 59.6% of total sales) that out-sells the three-door model (40.4%), underlining the 107's excellent packaging, which makes the most of its interior space and belies its compact wheelbase to provide a vehicle capable of transporting four people in comfort and making it a genuinely viable option for those with kids in tow.

If you thought the 107 was cheap to run before, wait until you run the rule over the latest car. The 1.0-litre engine always did display a stubborn refusal to consume fuel, but now the combined fuel consumption figure has edged up from 61.4mpg to 65.6mpg. The bigger news comes from the rear end of the car, where tailpipe emissions improve from 109g/km to 99g/km. This has all manner of benefits, including not having to pay a thing for a tax disc and free entry to the London congestion charge zone.

Insurance premiums are almost comically low, all 107s being rated in Group 1E, the lowest possible. The 107 is simple to purchase too. With Peugeot's Just Add Fuel personal finance package, buyers can drive it away with a three year fully comprehensive insurance deal (available to buyers 25 years of age and over), three years warranty, three years servicing and three years roadside assistance, all for a single fixed monthly payment. After you've paid that, all that remains is to just add fuel and when your car returns 65.6mpg, you don't even need to do a whole lot of that.

Failure to adapt is probably the chief cause of good cars falling by the wayside. Recent automotive history is littered with case studies of manufacturers who rested on their laurels and belatedly realised that buyers had moved on in their wants and needs. The Peugeot 107 is an interesting case. It hadn't changed that much in the seven years since it was first launched to the introduction of this facelifted car, but then sales suggested it didn't need to. It did the basics really well.

Where Peugeot has been clever is in judging exactly the right time to make an intervention. Cars like the Hyundai i10 and the Kia Picanto have changed the city car market and in order to combat that, Peugeot needed something special. In guaranteeing ultra low-emissions across the 107 range, as well as improving the styling and equipment provision, it's done what's required to make the 107 a solid recommendation for the foreseeable future. Job done.