Peugeot E-5008 - a confused SUV or a perfect EV for large families?

Big families have a big problem when it comes to choosing an electric car. They either have to compromise and split who’s going in the car and who’s jumping on the bus, they can buy two smaller EVs if they can afford to, or they can buy a non-electric seven-seater. In the UK, it is even worse - there are only a handful of large family EVs, and neither of them is really affordable, with the exception of the Citroen e-Berlingo and its Stellantis siblings.

Peugeot saw that market gap and decided to electrify its best-selling large SUV - and the result is the 2026 E-5008. On paper, this is a perfect solution for busy households: you get seven seats, you are promised over 300 miles of range, the SUV looks modern, and it doesn’t try to hide its size, plus the equipment list is okay. All that for a smidgen under $55,000? It’s not cheap, but it beats buying two EVs, and with finance options starting around $721 per month, many families took the plunge.

To see if those families are getting what they were promised, I rented a brand-new E-5008 210 for a few days and took it for a weekend to Scotland - after all, that’s what many families do on the weekends. The 210 version comes with a single electric motor delivering 210 horsepower, paired with a 73 kWh battery pack. This configuration promises just under 310 miles of driving range, which sounds spot on for the majority of use cases.

The vehicle I was driving came in the $1,030 optional Okenite White, which made this large SUV look crisp - it made the large 19” wheels pop even more and contrasted really well with the privacy glass. The first impressions count, and the E-5008 delivers on that front.

The front sits high, the narrow LED headlights squint at you but deliver surprisingly good performance. The gloss black cladding on the wheel arches and along the bottom of the car makes it look muscular and purposeful. The narrow windows bring the roof a little bit lower, making the E-5008 look aggressive and fast - even when it’s parked up. There is absolutely no dispute that Peugeot nailed it in the design department.

Once you jump in, you are greeted with Peugeot’s latest and greatest in interior design - modern swoopy lines, clever fabrics, and a slightly confusing multitude of screens. If you’ve never driven any of the modern Peugeots, the steering wheel is going to be a big (or rather - small) surprise. By any standards - it is small. It is tiny, and it sits in your lap, well below the 24” panoramic screen, making you feel like you are playing a simulator game and not really driving a large and heavy electric SUV.

The screen itself is divided into a fully interactive gauge cluster and the onboard entertainment part. The graphics are easy to understand, the transitions between different themes are smooth and funky, but honestly, unnecessary. This is another example of a car company trying to gamify the dashboard rather than focusing on the important stuff.

You can pick what you want to see - you can have your speed displayed, next to the range and animation of what the car is doing at any given moment, or you can have the speed overlaid on top of Google Maps if you are using an Android phone. That option is actually quite useful since the main screen never displays the map in street-level detail - one of many confusing quirks about the Peugeot infotainment.

Under the main screen, we have the most unusual solution from the French automaker - another screen with interactive toggles. Here you can select the options you want to see on the main screen, which is only about an inch above. These are shortcuts for the main menu - you can slide them from side to side to reveal more options, or you can just tap them to display the chosen menu on the main screen. You can then continue on the main screen to adjust whatever it is you want to adjust.

It is an absolutely pointless exercise - I found myself not using it at all and longing for actual buttons. Driving down the bumpy B-roads across Scotland and trying to adjust ventilation using the i-Toggles and then trying to stab the main screen in the right place to bring the temperature down nearly cost a couple of badgers their lives.

Both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are onboard, and both support wired and wireless connections. But the actual usability is a proverbial pain in the backside, especially when it comes to Android. Peugeot has its own satnav and voice assistant built in, and trying to use Gemini over it led to some funny conversations and many missed turns.

The only button to activate both voice assistants sits on the steering wheel - tap it, and Peugeot replies, hold it down, and Google chimes in. If the car hits the bump and your finger slides off the button, the Peugeot assistant will tell you it can’t connect to the internet, and Gemini won’t remember the initial request when you press the button again. I’m not entirely sure if it was something to do with my phone, but the experience was as much amusing as it was confusing.

The center console, the dashboard, and the door panels come in what the company calls “Rispy” embossed fabric - it’s a combination of denim and linen looks, in an inoffensive gray shade. In the photos, it looks really good; in real life, it looks even better - as long as you don’t touch it. The impression is that it should be soft, but in reality, it feels like hard plastic wrapped in thin fabric. Peugeot scores all the points here for the design, but absolutely zero for execution. I wonder what the storage cubby in the console that acts as the elbow support will look like after a couple of years of heavy use?

The final confusion comes from the wireless phone charger - it sits in a tiny slot under the i-toggle screen. You have to slide the phone in and wiggle it about to get the charge going. The green light tells you it’s all good, but the phone slides as the car navigates the road, and what you get is an orange and green disco in the dashboard. You end up spending way too much time trying to keep the phone in one place - I’m not sure that is a clever idea.

But there is absolutely no confusion when it comes to comfort. The E-5008 has plenty of room for everybody - the seats are plush and comfortable, and yet they hug you in that confidence-inspiring way. The middle bench is big enough for three adults, and it slides back and forth to make more room for passengers in the third row. And those passengers will need all the room they can get - two kids in the back will be fine, but trying to squeeze two adults in there for a longer stint can put family relations under a lot of stress.

With all seven seats taken, the cargo space is limited to 348 liters - certainly not enough room for luggage for seven people, but it is still usable. Put those rear seats down, and you end up with a cavernous 916 liters - enough for camping gear and a couple of dogs. Put all the rear seats down, and you have 2,232 liters of cargo space to play with. You could probably use the E-5008 as a small van when moving house.

Once on the move, the E-5008 is a very composed SUV - it is surefooted, it doesn’t lean much in the corners, and despite having only one electric motor for lugging nearly 2.5 metric tons with 4 people on board, it never feels slow. If anything, it actually is surprisingly quick, making overtaking effortless and reaching legal speeds in what feels much quicker than official numbers.

Then there’s the absolute lack of noise. Peugeot clearly spent a lot of time in the wind tunnel - with the windows up the cabin is very quiet. You can have a quiet conversation with people sitting in the back at motorway speeds. The tire noise and ride comfort are surprisingly good for 19” wheels, the car never feels harsh and hides its weight and size really well. Overall, it is a very comfortable cruiser, in that very typical French way.

The comfort it offers, suggests it should be a great long-distance cruiser, but here I found the main issue with this otherwise pretty good SUV. You could move all your belongings into the E-5008, you could take your whole family for a long weekend away, or use it as an emergency shuttle for a large event - as long as neither of those mean driving too far away. Peugeot claims a maximum range of 310 miles for the 73 kWh battery, but this has to be one of the most optimistic claims on the market.

During three days of testing, I never managed to get more than 230 miles out of the car. And that was when driving through A and B roads across Scotland - never going over 50 mph, never even switching the aircon on, accelerating gently and having only four people on board and no cargo. Imagine having seven people and a boot full of gear - you’d be lucky to get 200 miles.

Things get even worse when you want to use a motorway. I optimistically decided to speed up one of my test drives and presumed I’d have at least 200 miles or three hours of driving to enjoy. I quickly realized I was wrong - from being fully-charged, the indicated range dropped from the wildly optimistic 350 miles down to 260 miles within the first 15 minutes and then continued to drop by 2 miles for every mile driven.

After covering less than 40 miles, I had just over 100 miles of indicated range left and under 70% of battery left. It was the first time I had ever experienced range anxiety, and I decided to look for a DC charger and leave the motorway behind, which brought yet another unexpected issue. This one is only partially related to Peugeot and is something that every EV owner in the UK can relate to.

I decided to use a fast charger at motorway services - I won’t name the brand here because that’s not the point. Initially, I was surprised to see a row of empty chargers, but the reason for it became apparent fairly quickly. At $1.24 per kWh, I was looking at £22.50 for just over 25 kWh of energy after driving for 38 miles. At current prices in the UK, I could have bought 15 liters of unleaded, giving me at least 120 miles of range in the hybrid 5008.

Charging at 7kW takes over 12 hours

That is a painful bit of math right there, but the issue isn’t with the Peugeot - the problem is the UK pricing at the public charging stations. Slower 7kW chargers come in at $0.41 per kWh, but it took nearly 13 hours to recharge the 73 kWh battery ($30.14). Charging at home is the cheapest option at about $0.12 per kWh, depending on the supplier.

There is another issue with the E-5008 - and it’s the charging curve. Because I got to the DC charger with just under 70% SoC, the “sweet spot” window of 30 to 80% charging was firmly shut. After 50 minutes, the SUV added only 15% to the battery, making the whole experience even more miserable. Since I was only 120 miles from home, I decided to cut my losses, leave the motorway behind, and head back through the countryside.

With all that in mind, who is the Peugeot E-5008 for? That’s an easy answer - it is a perfect, if a little expensive, electric SUV for large families who don’t venture out of urban areas. Driving it in a city won’t be an easy job thanks to its size, but the range will stay well over 200 miles. If you don’t have a driveway or a garage, it’ll be expensive to run, though.

Opting for the larger 98 kWh battery model somehow fixes the range problem, but comes at a price. The dual-motor version isn’t available in the UK - it has two motors, but it uses the smaller 73 kWh battery with official range sitting at 286 miles. Judging from my experience with the FWD version, realistic range is much closer to 200 miles for the AWD model.

There can be only one conclusion to this review - the Peugeot E-5008 is a very confusing offer. It is large, comfortable, quiet, and surprisingly quick, but it falls very short on its long-distance promises. Trying to take advantage of fast charging means never draining the battery below 30%, and never charging it over 80%.

This leaves us with 50% of usable capacity, which results in a realistic range of no more than 80 miles at motorway speeds - that’s a 30-minute charging stop for every hour of driving. An 8-hour trip to Scotland turns into a 12-hour mission impossible and, courtesy of greedy pricing by oil giants who own the majority of fast chargers, can be three times more expensive than the same journey in a gas-powered car.

Still - the E-5008 makes sense for urbanites who like large SUVs and never venture out too far - that’s about 385,000 people in the UK, according to the latest estimates. It’s an excellent family hauler for people living in rural areas, as long as they can charge it at home and don’t travel more than 100 miles in one direction - and at an estimated 200,000 folk, that is a surprisingly large portion of the UK population. It seems Peugeot was quite clever - the E-5008 is designed to fit the exact expectations of a very specific group of customers, who (surprise, surprise) consider the $55,000 to $69,000 price range to be affordable.