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RPM TV Website | March 25, 2024

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Long Term Update: Peugeot 208 GTI – An introduction to self-parking

Peugeot 208 GTI Parking Assist
Adam Schoeman

Our Peugeot 208 GTI recently reached its 6 000 km milestone under RPM TV’s custodianship, and while the hot hatch, with its powerful 147 kW turbocharged 1,6-litre engine has little trouble propelling the relatively light body shell, it’s just not possible to drive it at ‘to-the-limit’ levels all of the time.

Fortunately, there’s more to the little hatch than just performance. One of its more hidden talents can be accessed via an interesting button on the right-hand side of the dashboard, next to the ESP switch. It’s marked with a capital “P” next to what looks like a steering wheel symbol.

I have encountered similar buttons on other vehicles, specifically the Fiat 500, where it would invoke a form of parking mode, boosting assistance to remove all effort from turning the steering wheel, ostensibly to make it easier to park.

The Peugeot’s P-button is there to help you park — but not by lightening the steering. Instead, it lets the car parallel park itself.

Because we don’t live in Europe I don’t often find myself having to parallel park, but the other night I was required to call upon those skills and instead of doing the usual “will I fit in that space” and “how much damage will there be if I mount that square kerb” calculations, I simply pushed the Parking Assist button.

The process is quite simple: while the parking space is still ahead of you, you push the button. The centre display will then ask you to indicate (with the indicator stalk) if you want to park on the left or right hand side of the car. The parking space that I was eyeing was on the left, so I pushed the stalk down as if I was indicating to turn left.

Then you creep forward past the parking space while the Park Distance Control measures the void, and checks that the car will actually fit, before beeping to alert you that the space is indeed big enough (phew!) once you have passed it.

With the parking space behind you, things now get spooky: the display will ask you to put the car into reverse and instruct you to creep backwards slowly and take your hands off of the steering-wheel. As you approach the space the electric steering will start to spin the wheel and reverse into the gap, and all you do is grit your teeth and keep on reversing, slowly.

The space I was trying to get into was particularly tight, so as the back of the GTI started to close in on the obstacle behind, the display informed me that I should stop and put the car into first gear and start creeping forward. I did this and the steering corrected and locked in the opposite direction, finishing off when the GTI was perfectly parked.

The system works remarkably well. It takes a little bit of time to figure out what to do the first time you use the parking system, but after that, the process is quick, intuitive and seamless.

You can also tell the car to get you out of the parking space again when it’s time to leave, at which point it will prompt you whether you need to go forward or reverse, while again taking control of the steering action.

As I said earlier, I don’t find myself having to parallel park often but behind the wheel of a 208 GTI, a potentially embarrassing (or damaging) process becomes a non-event. Expect applause from bystanders, too …

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