Peugeot infotainment review: i-Cockpit touchscreen tech tested vs rivals

There’s no doubt the Peugeot i-Cockpit set-up looks enticing on first acquaintance. It comprises a pair of digital displays that sweep across the top of the dashboard, with a wide driver information screen butting up to a similarly sized central infotainment touchscreen.

In the Peugeot E-3008, there’s an extra smaller touchscreen below the central touchscreen, split into six areas. Peugeot calls this the i-Toggle panel, because you can programme the areas with individual functions, and after a fashion they mimic the toggle switches you might find on a more ‘analogue’ set-up. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connect easily – and wirelessly – and you can select profiles for different drivers, saving your infotainment preferences.

The driver info panel shows all the operational and eco information you’d expect from a high-spec electric car, and using a button on the end of the right-hand stalk, you can scroll through a variety of preset configurations that give certain functions less or greater prominence. The central touchscreen has a left/right swipe function that allows you to swap between pages showing climate, media or navigation, and there’s a comprehensive widget menu to launch each function’s application page.

Some key functions can be accessed straight from the homescreen, and there’s a home button to return you there. The i-Toggles provide a wide range of easily programmable one-touch functions, including phoning a favourite contact or selecting a radio station. You can even choose a one-touch massage, although our car massaged the passenger when the i-Toggle was set to massage the driver.

That’s not the only glitch either, because in day-to-day use we’ve found the touchscreen frequently unresponsive without repeated touches or swipes, which can be frustrating and distracting in equal measure. And while there’s plenty of content and features to play with, our testers have found the system complex and insufficiently intuitive.

Test team views

• Dean says: “There’s a lot of toggles and shortcuts, to the point where the actual drive selector is very hard to find. The touchscreen itself was a bit temperamental and the media button didn’t react until you hit it multiple times. There are extra programmable ‘toggle’ switches, but it feels as though you’re always hunting around for different settings.”
• Shane says: “The screen is very busy. The secondary touchscreen ‘toggle’ bar is quite nice, but the whole system occasionally had a mind of its own. Not all the time, I admit, but it did like to put up a fight when you really didn’t want it to. It wasn’t too bad, but it just didn’t feel convenient, and sometimes didn’t want to do what it’s supposed to. That was rather frustrating.”
• Victoria says: “It’s too much. I like that the screen is above the steering wheel height, so it’s easy to see what you need, but the buttons don’t always work, or are not responsive, so you hit them more than once to get what you want. Once I had to press multiple times to change the radio. So it’s not great, and it all feels a bit cluttered with too much going on at once.”

Display and navigation

• Destination: A logically laid out keyboard, points of interest and previous destinations help the E-3008 to set a route quickly, and the mapping is simple and uncluttered.
• Settings: Changing options on the Peugeot involves at least one sub-menu, sometimes more, but climate shortcuts at the top of the screen are useful.
• Home: Widgets are shown in groups of three and you sweep from side to side to access other functions, although the screen can be slow to respond.

What's the app like?

If you’ve spent any time on Peugeot’s website, the company’s smartphone app replicates its early 2010s-style HTML look brilliantly. Leaving aside aesthetics, the MyPeugeot app has all the standard features you’d expect including remote unlocking, plus the ability to monitor your car’s fuel consumption or level of charge remotely.

We do like having the ability to remotely preset a specific cabin temperature and even defer charging an EV to a certain time, although we did find the app as a whole rather tricky to set up. The app ranked in 9th place of the ten that we tested.

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