No new Peugeot 106: Brand plans 7 fresh models but no cheap city car
Peugeot CEO Alain Favey tells Auto Express that although he’d love a car to replace the beloved 104 and 106, his priorities lie elsewhere
Peugeot will introduce seven cars by 2030 in a European new-model push. But while brand CEO Alain Favey would love to re-enter the city car segment, a small electric car isn’t one of his magnificent seven.
“Do I think Peugeot has relevance in that part of the market? Yes, I do,” he told Auto Express at Le Mans. “We sold one million small cars in the past, with 106, 107, 108.”
Peugeot’s owner, Stellantis, is fast-tracking a range of new, small electric cars under its E-car project. Engineers are hard at work on a vehicle architecture to underpin low-cost city cars from Fiat, Citroën and its Chinese joint-venture partner, Leapmotor. The programme will yield successors to the legendary Citroën 2CV and Fiat Panda – but not a new Peugeot in the initial wave.
“As it stands, [a 108 replacement] is not part of the strategy, there is no plan, there is no project,” Favey told us.
However his fondness for small cars is evident, with Favey name-checking the car which cemented Peugeot’s presence in that market, the 104. The 1972 baby saloon – which measured just 3.6m long – was one of Peugeot’s early front-wheel-drive cars. The boss said he recently inspected all the cars built at Mulhouse at an event inaugurating the facelifted 408, and the 104 really caught his eye.
The 106 replaced it as Peugeot’s entry car in 1991, with the lightweight, four-cylinder hatchback part of a purple patch of great-handling nineties cars – including the 406, 306 and 206 – and the line-up crowned by a GTi version.
However, with Peugeot being Stellantis’s ‘upper mainstream’ brand – priced above Citroën and Fiat but below Alfa Romeo – it makes more sense for Peugeot to take a back seat while others push forward with E-cars costing around £13,000.
“We'll do the C-segment and B-segment [cars], that’s what we said we’d do and we will do,” concluded the boss. The European model offensive kicks off with the new E-208 in 2027, with an E-2008 SUV and three mid-size cars, including the next 308, set to follow.
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