A Revamped Peugeot Exalt Will Go To Paris
And it will be bringing a date. The Peugeot Exalt concept car, which appeared in the Beijing Motor Show last April and set all he...
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And it will be bringing a date.
The Peugeot Exalt concept car, which appeared in the Beijing Motor Show last April and set all hearts aflutter, will be appearing in the upcoming Paris Motor Show, with several interesting (and one exciting) updates. Although Peugeot is decidedly a French marque, the company choosing to showcase its latest concept car in Beijing before Paris should come as no surprise after Dongfeng Motors, one of the largest automotive manufacturers in China, acquired a 14% stake in the company, bringing the family reign over the oldest French automobile manufacturer to an end.
But, enough about business. Back to the car.
The Exalt is a large 4-wheel drive saloon that builds on the French carmaker’s Onyx concept introduced back in 2012. The Exalt runs on a plug-in HYbrid4 drivetrain, which has a 270hp 1.6-litre THP engine mated to a 50 kW electric motor, to generate a total output of 335hp.
The most discernible alteration with the Paris-bound version is a toned-down livery, from the previously rust-red rear (which reminded many of a certain primate) to a dark, matte grey; the rear is still trimmed from the same ‘shark skin’ material as before, an ingenious biomimicry to improve the vehicle’s aerodynamic performance and reduce drag. The rest of the body is clad in raw steel, formed by hand by a master sheet-metal artisan, as how French cars were made in the twenties and thirties. Raw metal...as if the car is telling you that it doesn’t even need to try very hard to look this good.
The Exalt's former incarnation |
Inside, the Exalt had donned ebony trimmings for it’s Beijing showcase, but has swapped the darker wood, which is plentiful in China, for a pinkish ‘newspaper wood’ which, as the term suggests, is made from recycled newspapers; business newspapers, to be exact, although Peugeot doesn’t explain why only this type of papers. If sourcing for local materials is the reason behind material choice, then the newspapers with the highest circulation in Europe is probably….The Sun; but of course saying that the car is inlaid with tabloid material doesn’t sound very classy.
Now, the thing that we think is truly exciting is that this new version comes with a plus one. A foldaway electric scooter, named the ‘HYbrid-kick’, is stowed below the Exalt’s boot bottom, and can be retrieved for “covering last-mile mobility”. The idea is ingenious - if only all vehicles came with a special compartment that houses a foldaway two-wheeler, so that we could park at the edge of the city or further away from traffic-congested destinations, and then bike the rest of the way. Peugeot has not released any images of the scooter yet; of course we are imagining and hoping for something like this:
Peugeot's ONYX Concept Scooter |
But we are also prepared to disappointed, considering the limited space under the boot, and would not be surprised to see something like this instead: