Re: 1979 Peugeot 505 review

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The 505 has a longitudinally mounted engine and it´s oversquare. The crankshaft has 5 bearings and the cooling fan is self-engaging (aren´t they all these days?). The cylinder block is cast iron, explaining the 2645 lbs weight. Ford´s stripling, the Granada weighs a mere 2612 kilos.

I tested the 505 in SR specification, assuredly the most popular choice for the middle-ranking businessman market. The engine is a carburetted 1971 cc unit which produces 96 horspower and 118 ft lbs of torque (trumping the wheezy Granada´s 111 ft lbs). In manual form, Peugeot claim that the car can return 29 mpg at 75 mph. During a steady drive around the Péripherique I managed a more realistic 26 mpg. The fuel tank holds 12.3 gallons, allowing 320 comfortable miles between feeds, perhaps more if you drive cautiously. I was unable to record any acceleration figures but the quoted 12 seconds to 60 mph sounds credible. Importantly, the car can push ahead and keep up with the rest of the charging executives rushing to meet month´s end targets. The engine drones a bit, especially at cruising speed. Perhaps a fifth gear would be handy, but again that´s reserved for the TI and STI models. Most competitors make do with four anyway.

The saloon deploys Mastervac power assisted disc brakes at the front, drums hindmost. Only the more expensive TI and STI have rear discs. The brakes work very well: as an example of this, I motored to Versailles where I wanted lunch at the Bistro Petit Guignol. Their stewed ox-kidney (in wine with mushrooms) is legendary. However, a roadside sign at a truckstop promised cassoulet for only 12 francs so I made a lightning-fast decision to stop there and then. The car pulled up straight and without fuss. So, that was lunch.

I realised it had been a while since I´d tucked into a really good braised shin of beef. It´s a cheap and tough cut of meat but handled well, it can be corking. In a sense, the Peugeot is like this. The car is a straight forward saloon but all aspects of its design and construction have been handled with consummate skill.

There´s a friendly hotel in Nantes called the Duc D´Orly where braised shin is superbly prepared and well worth the 260 mile trip. I meandered out of Versailles, feeling quite fresh despite the very sizeable brandies that had rounded off lunch. Underway, I decided that the steering, a rack and pinion system, which is power assisted on all models is pleasant and very well balanced. Compared to the porridge from Vauxhall, the Peugeot´s steering astonishing and perhaps this is the 505´s best trait. Perhaps only Citroen, Bristol and Lancia might to do it better. That said, only motoring correspondents care much about steering.

The ashtray was competitively sized but is placed directly behind the gearstick. For British market cars, this will be a constant nuisance while our continental cousins will consider the placement quite logical and natural.

The route from Versailles to Nantes afforded a good chance to try the car on the open roads.
The 505 feels well planted at normal speeds. On the limit, the rear-drive 505 presents a smidgin of understeer but if you lift off the throttle suddenly, the tail loosens and some perceptible oversteer makes itself felt. The steering signals this by lightening. It takes a mere flick of opposite lock to correct this or, alternatively one can open the throttle to adjust the 505´s attitude. It seems here that while the car looks strikingly restrained there is a streak of the same sporting behaviour that makes the BMW 518i the choice of pushy professional men today. The 505 can behave like a driver´s car, a detail to give BMW, Alfa and Triumph cause for pause.

Re: 1979 Peugeot 505 review

_{And here is the second item, written for "Drivers & Motorists Monthly" (February 1979).}

Point Counterpoint
Archie Vicar muses on the meaning of Peugeot´s exciting new saloon, the 505.
_{Photo by Crispin Darling}

The keenly contested large car sector is very profitable. 2.46 million large cars were bought in Europe in 1976. Manufacturers pick different weapons with which to capture these customers. Ford uses keen pricing and generous specifications to help the set-square Granada find its customers (300,000 a year!). Vauxhall tries to offer reassuring safe handling and predictability. Citroen insist wild-eyed technology and futuristic styling will be the way forward for the CX. Renault offer us mystery and confusion in the form of the ancient 16 or the purposeless 30. Rover suggest brash Brummie modernism with their rakish 2000 and 2600.

Into this hard-fought fray drives the new 505 from the Lion Marque. What is its unique atttraction? It´s a bit early to say.

Attacking it from another angle: the Peugeot 604, as many readers know, is a very fine saloon. We pitted it (October `77) against the Citroen CX 2400 Pallas, Ford´s Granada 2.8 V6 and the Mercedes 230E and it claimed first prize. It is is more spacious than the Granada, more pleasing to drive than the Mercedes (by a wide margin) and more agile and wieldy than the CX, and cheaper too. Hence the puzzlement I experienced when looking at the 505 in Orly airport carpark. It´s 6 inches shorter than the 604 but is much cheaper. It would appear to compete with the 604 since anyone who likes that car (and well they might) may find the 505 to be (nearly) the same but better (in some ways). That said, 505 still not as well made as the Mercedes, not as cheap as the Granada and not as daft as the CX (nothing is, to be frank). The only people who will worry about the Peugeot 505 are the fellows who try to make a living selling the Peugeot 604. Perhaps it would have been better either to fit a 2-litre motor into the 604 and forget the 505 or else make a V6 available in the 505 and pension off the 604. Nobody seems to want it, sadly.

After a hearty lunch during the test drive, I stood under an awning and I stared at the car while enjoying a few filterless Gauloises. I looked at rain drops beading on the 505´s bronze metallic paint (an extra cost option). Pininfarina have styled the car (I wouldn´t let Peugeot near such a delicate job). It doesn´t look very Italian nor very French. Nor very German. Nor British. But it does look as if Peugeot have worked hard to make the car look cheaper than the 604.

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Re: 1979 Peugeot 505 review

:-)

Benz´s dull taxis (which neither ride nor handle but offer a lifetime of ill-informed self-satisfaction

....perfect!

Re: 1979 Peugeot 505 review

In 1973, my father was working for an engineering firm in the Midlands, and had recently taken delivery of a white XJ6. Since he wasn’t too interested in cars himself, it was at my instigation that he had specified a set of fancy Dunlop wheels in place of the rather dull standard items - at the time we both thought these looked pretty good, but hindsight might say otherwise.

One day he was leaving a restaurant after a rather long business lunch. He was about to start the Jaguar when an irate middle-aged man started banging on the window, accusing him of trying to steal the car. Not the most patient person, and feeling justifiably angry himself, he was soon standing face to face with this fellow in the car park, surrounded by restaurant staff, arguing ownership of the car, which the other man was adamant was his. That is until he looked down at the wheels, exclaimed “Bloody Hell!”, produced a set of keys from his pocket, looked at them, then walked over to a shiny small car, which my father later identified as an Allegro, calmly started it and drove off down the road - in a perfectly straight line, my dad noticed, possibly helped by the square steering wheel. My father was all for calling the police, but the Manager seemed to know the other chap so dissuaded him.

A few days later he received, via the Restaurant, two bottles of a very nice vintage port accompanied by a note signed, none too convincingly, ‘A Miserable Penitent’. This explained that he was a motoring journalist and that, until the day before their meeting, he had been driving an XJ6 on loan from Jaguar, identical except that it had ‘proper wheels’. This comment re-awoke my father’s fury and, whenever he retold this story, the fellow was invariably a “rude, drunken sod”. A bit ungenerous I thought, since the port was excellent.

Being a sometime reader of Cars and Vehicle, I suspected that this unidentified man might have been Archie Vicar, but my father showed no interest in pursuing the matter further and it got lost in the mist of time. Reading the various reprints that bertandnairobi has been posting has been fascinating. There were once so many great characters in the motor industry and, in today’s anodyne climate, it’s sometimes hard to believe that they ever existed. Do you think it could have been Mr Vicar that my father encountered?
 

Re: 1979 Peugeot 505 review

"Thanks bertandnairobi for making this available."

You are very welcome. I should point out that this item was the hardest to "transcribe" of all the ones done so far. The car really is very hard to write about it and I found that the "transcription" was danger of taking on a stlyle akin to LKJ Setright, so difficult was it to parse. One of the lines I left out was something like this: "Cars like the CX are often described as engineer´s cars, being so evidently full of innovation and originality. But it´s easy to be original and such cars are for artists. The engineer´s car follow a harder path, that of conforming not to a personal ideal, but to an objective one. Such a car is the 505 and it´ll get little thanks for its labours."