I could amuse and entertain you, I’m sure, with the news that the Peugeot RCZ is the first new Peugeot in living memory not to use the zero and double-zero numbering system that the French company has long and, you might say, anally favoured (the Peugeot 307, the Peugeot 5008, etc). But big woo, frankly, because surely the headline story here, knocking all nomenclature-related matters clean off the agenda, is that the RCZ is the first Peugeot ever to look convincingly like the Batmobile.
Now, one automatically says “the Batmobile”, but, of course, there have been a number of different, revised Batmobiles, in varying shapes and sizes, down the years. The Corgi model I had as a child in the 1970s, for instance, was crimped and sharp-edged. (It also had a shard of pink plastic up its exhaust, to create a perhaps slightly hopeful impression of flame, and it shot similarly pink plastic missiles a surprisingly long distance across carpets, where babies could later find and swallow them. It was, altogether, a vehicle of enormous distinction.) Subsequent Batmobiles, though, across the developing film franchise, have reflected the times by growing ever more soft and globular, presumably in compliance with North American and European pedestrian safety regulations. (They have also, one assumes, ceased representing a choking hazard in the way that they used to.) Nevertheless, what has always been there on a Batmobile — its signature detail — is the “double-bubble” roof, the twin-zoned Plexiglas top beneath which a superhero and his choice of faintly irritating consort can travel in comfort, united and yet, at the same time, in their own separate spheres of influence.
And now here is that self-same roof on, of all things, a reasonably priced Peugeot. You’re not quite fastened in under your personal glass dome, as Batman tends to be, and the central dip is visible most profoundly from the back, rather than from the front, sadly — but it’s there, nevertheless, an eccentric and hugely commendable piece of the architecture on what is altogether a handsome, head-turning and, to all intents and purposes, rather Audi-like coupé.
What’s startling about the RCZ is the extent to which it looks like a concept car — and one never expects to see those in the flesh. The relation of concept cars to the cars we end up driving is like the relation of haute couture to off-the-peg clothing in the fashion world. A car company will unveil “a concept” at a car show much in the way that a designer will send a model up the catwalk wearing four bottle tops and a broken umbrella — with no assumption that anyone will eventually wear this kind of thing, but just to see what happens. Concept cars tend to have exciting door handles and Post-Modern wheel arches and adventurous brake lights and everyone walks round them and gets very excited about the future. Then, a couple of years later, the produced car comes out and it looks like a Ford Fiesta. If you’re lucky.
Not the RCZ. It has the brave sweep of the drawings — and the door handles, the wheel arches, the brake lights. I had a diesel with a surprisingly big steering wheel. It had been carefully and tastefully upholstered and it drove a lot tamer than it looked. But maybe that’s a good thing.
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Does flame shoot out of its exhaust? I don’t know, is the honest answer, because I was in the driving seat most of the time, but my hunch would be that it doesn’t — not unless you accelerate really, really hard and use your own, home-made petrol. Just for the avoidance of confusion I probably should point out that it doesn’t launch missiles, either, pink or otherwise. But you can’t have everything.
Peugeot RCZ HDi 163
Price £22,250 Top speed 134mph Acceleration 0-62 in 8.7sec Average consumption 53.2mpg CO2 emissions 139g/km Rating Middle-of-the-road Frenchman heads to the Bat Cave