In 2023 Peugeot is celebrating a very special anniversary that links it to Italy: the Lion’s brand is in fact responsible for the first car registered in Italy, a Type 3 delivered in January 1893 to a founder of a textile industry in the Vicenza area, Gaetano Rossi di Schio. Peugeot wanted to celebrate the 130th anniversary of its debut in what is now its most important market after the French one, uniting the past, present and future. Theater of the celebration the National Automobile Museum of Turin, where the original Type 3 has been kept since the 1950s, and where it was joined by the latest addition, the Peugeoy 408, and virtually by the Inception concept car seen at the beginning of the year at CES in Las Vegas.
It was precisely the comparison between the latest model and the one that prefigures the next ones that offered the Global Marketing & Communication Director Phil York, who spoke together with Thierry Lozano, director of Peugeot Italia, the opportunity to talk about the evolution of the brand’s style. In particular, concerning the user experience offered by the car: sedan/crossover where sporty lines merge into an new “high” body, the 408 in fact presents the development of the i-Cockpit, one of the brand’s highlights in recent years, with three-dimensional effect and two-level display, in the by now typical raised position above a small diameter steering wheel with a hexagonal profile. The Inception showed an even more avant-garde projection of this concept with the Hypersquare, the rectangular steering wheel entirely “by wire” equipped with four large touch areas with which to access the on-board functions and capable of retracting into the dashboard during the self-driving mode.
“Innovation is one of the pillars of Peugeot” – York reiterated – but we can already see the guidelines of our future today, with the next models arriving and with those we are designing now. Inception shows what the design of the cars that we will launch in the coming years and that we will still see on the roads in 2050 will look like, but that we are already imagining today”.
