Have you entered the Peugeot Eco Cup challenge? We have, and we are quietly confident that our entry will, erm, probably end up in the bin.

Peugeot has launched the Eco Cup in an attempt to highlight the miserly fuel consumption of its latest diesels, specifically the HDi varieties of its 207 supermini, 308 C-segment hatch, 3008 oddball and 5008 MPV. All of the HDi cars turn in impressive mpg figures and the Eco Cup is a clever attempt to drum up some attention for them. We’re not sure what happened to Peugeot’s “Blue Lion” eco branding, by the way – the label is notable only by its absence on the Eco Cup web site.

The challenge will see four teams drawn from entrants across 18 countries compete in a race between Paris and Geneva, starting on the last day of February and concluding 36 hours later, in time for the opening of the Geneva motor show. And by race we mean crawl, really – with the emphasis on tortoise- over hare-style progress. The winners will be the drivers who use the least Derv to complete the cross-border route and, with 622 miles to cover, competitors could make the distance within the allotted time by travelling at less than 18mph. We assume most will go slightly faster and stop for a rest, of course.

By way of a line in the sand, Peugeot works racing driver Stéphane Sarrazin has taken each of the four cars along the fixed route to record a consumption score that the Cup finalists will need to beat. And don’t imagine that Le Mans veteran Sarrazin is a lead-foot who has racked up scores in the low teens – in his day job, careful fuel conservation can keep a driver out of the pits and on the podium. His highly impressive scores are:

• 207 HDi: 80.7mpg


• 308 HDi: 78.5mpg


• 3008 HDi: 70.7mpg


• 5008 HDi: 67.3mpg

Entries close on 12 February, and all you have to do is pick your favoured vehicle and then write something clever, witty or pithy, in 140 characters or less, that encapsulates the secrets of greener motoring.

The team that records the best consumption score in each of the four vehicles will get to keep the car. Or, given that each team is made up of two individuals, winning drivers will be awarded half a car and the opportunity to fight over the whole.

Measuring 208.4cm or 6ft 10in from the tip of one triangular mirror to the other, Vauxhall’s Insignia EcoFlex turns out to be the widest car we’ve yet tested for this blog. We can tell it’s the widest because it wouldn’t fit through the narrow gate to GreenMotor towers until one of its Spock-ears was folded away. And with the UK’s air supply arriving direct from the arctic at the time, we found ourselves wishing for the frippery of power folding. Dropping a window to shift a mirror with a frigid fingertip is not exactly a route to winter warmth.

There’s no denying that the Insignia is a family sized motor, so we are duly impressed that it turns in an official CO2 score of 136g/km. OK, so that’s not exactly vying with the Toyota Prius to be crowned the cleanest full five-seater, but 54.7 miles for each gallon of your finest diesel, in combined cycle theory at least, is not too shabby.

The EcoFlex badge on the rump adds about £540 to the price of an Insignia – the green label can be added to any trim level except the sport-leaning SRi. As well as a the shiny label you get a particulate filter, eco tyres, a flat undertray, a remapped engine, dropped suspension, longer gears and an insistent reminder on the dashboard telling you to change up.

Collectively, these tweaks can cut fuel consumption by about a tenth. Along with savings in road tax, this means the average private punter will pay off the EcoFlex premium only if they keep the Insignia for three years or at least 35,000 miles. That’s assuming diesel doesn’t suddenly hockey-stick upwards from its current £5-a-gallon level. Company car buyers, at whom the Insignia is squarely aimed, can start to save real money after as little as 12 months.

Going back to those door mirrors, they are a hopeless shape. Wide at the inside but pointed and narrow at the tips, they provide a great view of nothing at all. We don’t like them, particularly given that rearward visibility in our five-door test car was abysmal. Reversing sensors would be a sound investment, X-ray vision a help.

We’re wary of long gearboxes in eco-label specials - some succeed in making their motor truly horrid to drive. Thankfully the Insignia is immune to this malady - almost. Around town we found ourselves using gear three out of the six available, when we might normally choose fourth, but third keeps the car on form around 30mph and doesn’t hobble the fuel consumption too much. On faster roads the gearbox feels more natural, and will even pull up minor motorway inclines in sixth. Whatever our steady speed, there was always a gear to keep the gruff motor murmuring along quietly and the mpg meter happy.

We did manage to virtually stall the car at one traffic light, which obligingly turned from red to green just as we rolled up. As we were still moving we slotted into second and expected to glide away on a wave of torque, instead provoking a tuberculean coughing fit. Long gears and the real world don’t always align, even when you have almost 160bhp and 350Nm on tap, but we soon got used to the need to slip the clutch in such circumstances.

High points of the Insignia include its lovely interior, excellent forward visibility, great seats with wide adjustment, super automatic wipers, a nice electronic handbrake, helpful follow-me-home lighting and puddle lamps, beautiful interior illumination and an overall feeling of well-built solidity.

Turn-offs include the Scrabble-bag of buttons on our car’s centre console, which we suppose we’d eventually learn to tell from each other, dusk-sensing lamps that sensed dusk beneath every passing cloud, and a dismal photochromatic rear-view mirror that reduced the already narrow rear view to dim pointlessness at night. We prefer being dazzled to not being able to see behind at all.

The steering wheel is nicely sculpted but is fairly tight-lipped in its messages about front-end traction, and the brakes are similarly mute. The suspension, which has been lowered by 10mm in pursuit of reduced frontal area, feels well sprung but somewhat under-damped. Cornering is relatively flat, surface gremlins are suitably smothered, but you will occasionally feel you are piloting a boat across a choppy sea.

Lasting impressions? The Insignia feels like a lot of car for the money – our Exclusiv Nav EcoFlex came with Bluetooth, a fine built-in satnav system and the kind of Xenon headlamps that peer around corners, yet cost just a fiver over £22,000 on the road.

Of course it’s a Vauxhall, so it holds its value like a Christmas cracker. A quick riffle through the approved used scheme produced a 2009 model with less than 6,000 miles on its clock, for £15,499. That really is a lot of eco car for the cash – widthways at least.

Back in November Peugeot began taking orders for its iOn electric car, which is of course a Mitsubishi i-Miev electric car with a silver lion stuck to its nose. The first iOns are due to be delivered towards the end of this year, alongside the similarly badge-engineered C-Zero from sister brand Citroen.

Welcome as the iOn is, it seemed both timid and half-hearted when compared with fellow French maker Renault’s electric ambitions, which are both fully formed and imminent. Renault plans to market four different pure-electric vehicles in the next 24 months, starting early in 2011.

Now it has become clear that Peugeot’s electric car intentions extend beyond buying job lots of badge adhesive. Today the company confirmed that it intends to create a production version of the BB1 show car, which was well received when it was unveiled in September last year. “Peugeot has now decided to design and build a vehicle which will embody all of the spirit of the BB1: 2.5m, 4 seats and 100% electric,” the company said. For which we should read, the upcoming car will be the same size as the BB1 but is unlikely to share its garden-shed-in-a-gale styling theme.

We await word on when the production BB1 might hit the road.

Back in September we optimistically volunteered to take part in the upcoming Smart ED public trial. Mercedes-Benz contacted us just before Christmas to confirm that we have passed through the first filter. Next up are credit checks, and beyond those lie a visit from trial partner EDF Energy to see if our domestic wiring can take the strain of juicing up Smart’s diminutive electric runabout.

We fully expect to clear these hurdles, but we are somewhat dismayed at the estimated costs. In September, the projected outlay was listed as “sub-£200 per month”. But now the latest trial prospectus reveals the need for much deeper pockets: one initial payment of £750, plus monthly payments of £250 for a minimum commitment of 12 months, plus insurance (group to be confirmed) and servicing. So the full cost will be the wrong side of £4,000 for a year of short-range, two-seat, electrically propelled travel. Roughly double the initial estimate, in other words.

Still, as the company points out, there are “no depreciation concerns”. Helpful, that.

For the moment we are leaving our name on the list, but we’re not 100 per cent sure we can afford to continue. We’d welcome a sponsor, if anyone with a kind heart and a lot of spare cash happens to be reading...

Hmm. Not quite the Pirelli Calendar we were hoping for :-(

In the past we’ve dug up a few interesting automotive brand names at the UK Intellectual Property Office – most makers tend to register a name as a trademark before it appears on any real car’s rump. But while we’ve been first to notice the odd curio, we’ve been less than reliable in our subsequent guesswork.

For example, when we highlighted that Vauxhall and Opel had registered the old Buick name “Electra” we thought that would be an ideal name for what actually ended up as the Ampera – the Euro version of the Chevy Volt. Some other bloggers liked our deductions and ran the same story – some even credited us.

We also thought that iStream might be a neat production name for Gordon Murray’s three-seat city car, the T25. And we were wrong again – iStream is the name of the T25’s minimalist production process. Two other names – iFrame and iCentre refer to, we think, the T25’s distinctive spaceframe-plus-sheet chassis (patent applied for) and flexible seating arrangements (ditto).

Still, not being right hasn’t stopped us digging. But it has stopped us guessing. So we will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what Gordon Murray is going to do with two new brands: iWheel and iLink.

OK, we can’t help ourselves. Guesses follow.

According to Autocar, the T25 will have a big door in its nose, to allow entry in the style of an Isetta bubble-car. So we think iWheel and iLink will be Murray’s patent-pending designs to allow the steering and pedals, respectively, to fold out of the way when the main hatch is opened.

Unless, of course, we’re wrong and they aren’t.