The Peugeot 206 CC Drive (Thanks Riss for finding this article).


VIDEO: The beauty of Bath in the Peugeot 206 CC: 56k - 100k - 300k

VIDEO: The top comes off the Peugeot 206 CC: 56k - 100k - 300k

VIDEO: Peugeot 206 CC in impressive form: 56k - 100k - 300k

Funny thing isn’t it, you wait for ages for a really exciting car to come along, then three turn up at once. Literally at once with Peugeot’s brilliant 206 CC.

The 206 Coupe Cabriolet, with its clever folding steel roof and sparkling performance, is three cars in one – a pretty and practical 2+2 coupe, a sporty cabrio, and a sharp-handling GTi chaser. That’s three cars that, together, make this the perfect time to give in to midsummer temptation, heading out from the busy city to the sun, sand and sea, using some of the finest driving roads in Britain. And the 206 CC delivers exactly the right

mood for wherever you choose to take it – a trick very few cars can match, and one reason for the CC’s incredible success, as the UK’s biggest selling cabriolet. It shouldn’t be a surprise; the 206 CC is a success story rooted in vibrant design and an exciting personality, not unlike our starting point, the elegant but buzzing city of Bath, our gateway to the west country. They have a lot in common. Like Peugeot’s mould breaking 206 CC, Bath won its popularity by making people feel better - and feel better with style. So, generations after the Romans recognised the attractions of Bath’s spa waters, the elegant city grew up around the ancient baths, to become one of Europe’s most fashionable destinations.

The Romans knew a thing or two about clever engineering and building things to last too. A brand new spa now brings visitors to Bath, but the Roman original is also still there – its amazing heating system as pampering in its day as the digital air conditioning and Climate Control that come as standard with our 206 CC SE, so even when the mid-summer temperature is hitting all-time records, we’re cool and comfortable. Pampered in other ways too because our standard equipment also includes electric windows all round, electrically adjustable and heated door mirrors, tinted glass, a height adjustable, leather-rimmed steering wheel, a six-speaker radio and CD system with remote digital display.

Above all though, both Bath and the Coupe Cabriolet have distinctive styles of their own. For the car, a bang up to date mix of great looks and unrivalled versatility - for the city a unique combination of classic Regency architecture and the modern buzz of a bustling city centre. But even with holiday traffic and tight one-way systems, Peugeot’s swap-top Coupe Cabriolet is the perfect town car – compact enough to nip through the gaps, punchy enough never to miss an opportunity. Plenty of room for all those tempting trinkets from Bath’s wall-to-wall designer shops and antique arcades, too. Not to mention the reassurance that it will all be there when you come back because the CC also has remote central deadlocking, a lockable glove box and fuel filler and locking nuts for its handsome alloy wheels.

It isn’t just a pretty face and a safe place for your shopping - it’s a super-smart piece of packaging, too. With its hydraulic motors and electronic controls, that sexy roof is a brilliant solution to the unpredictable British weather. All you need to do is open two catches and press a button, whenever you want to change moods or modes. So when the temperature goes up, the top can come down - in less than twenty seconds.

Just hit the switch and all four side windows drop automatically, the rear deck lifts and the rigid roof folds quickly and quietly away, before the deck clicks snugly back over it – transforming the coupe into a drop-head gorgeous cabriolet. And if the clouds come back, it’s just as easy to turn cabriolet back to coupe.

Dropping the top doesn’t mean having to drop the luggage or shopping either – because top-down there’s still ample boot space under the retractable cover to satisfy the most serious kitchen-sink packer. And unlike a conventional soft-top, the CC has the protection of a hard-top when you need to leave it in town, plus the interior refinement of a coupe when you head for the countryside. Which is what we’ll do next – aiming south and west, along the spectacular A39, cross-country to the west coast, all the way to the surfing, sailing, sunbathing beaches of north Cornwall. A perfect road for the compact, sharp handling 206 CC, not motorway, rarely even dual carriageway - but a real drivers’ road with curves and crests and cambers, flowing over rolling landscapes. A road to remind yourself what driving for the sheer pleasure of it, in a great car, is really about.


It’s certainly not the kind of road where you’d exploit the 138bhp 2-litre 16-valve CC’s 127mph top speed potential, but it’s definitely the kind where you’d enjoy its punchy performance and huge flexibility. That’s headlined by a 0-62mph time of just 8.9 seconds, but in everyday driving the 206 CC’s depths are far more apparent in its ability to carve effortlessly through the flowing twists and curves of a road like this while apparently being glued to the ground and cocooned in comfort. That’s all about the CC’s sporty driving dynamics, which are just as impressive in either coupe or cabriolet mode as they are in the hot hatch on which the 206 CC is based.

So whether the roof is up or down, even on poor surfaces, the CC’s ride and handling feel almost identical to those of the 206 hatch - that means razor sharp steering, with the precision and feedback to rival anything on the road, major league sports cars included. And because it hasn’t had to soften up its suspension settings to compensate for a bendier shell, the CC retains all the 206 hatch’s agile feel, strong grip and fine pointability, plus all the driver focussed responses that stand any 206 several rungs above the common herd. It is true to say that the CC adds most of the fun of Peugeot’s definitive hot hatch to the versatility of a coupe and a cabriolet.

There’s a lot of creature comfort too. The rear seats are individual buckets, perfect for smaller members of the family or if there aren’t any of those, for additional luggage, either top-up or top-down. The front sports seats are a slightly snugger shape than on the hatches, and set a bit lower, further reinforcing the CC’s sporty personality. Yet even with the top down, the 206 CC is astonishingly civilised, right up to motorway speeds. The windscreen reaches back towards the front seat occupants’ heads, and with side windows up, even without the optional rear ‘wind-jammer’ screen, there’s almost no buffeting inside. In fact at a steady 70mph you can hold a conversation at virtually normal levels without having to scream your head off above the howling gale, and that isn’t something you could say about every soft-top on the market. It makes driving just for the sake of driving a real pleasure.

Out of the city, the A39 runs through the Mendip Hills, weaving south and west to pick up the Somerset and Devon coast. It runs past Glastonbury, with the mystical Tor overlooking the town, across the Polden Hills to Minehead on the Exmoor Heritage Coast, then on to one of the most spectacular stretches on the whole route, past Porlock Bay and Porlock Hill - famous as one of the steepest roads in Britain. It has a gradient of one in four at the bottom that’s difficult even to walk up. But where Porlock used to be a serious challenge for many a smaller sporty car, the 2-litre CC has the flexibility to charge up without pausing for breath. The truly breathtaking part now is when you reach the top, after a couple of climbing, twisting miles though the wooded hills, and emerge high above the bay on the heather covered fringes of Exmoor, with stunning views over the mouth of the Bristol Channel, as the towering cliffs of the coastline fade into the distance and the Atlantic Ocean.

The road follows the coast all the way, often right on it, sometimes a little way inland, but the 206 CC laps up every entertaining mile. All the way, there are pretty villages rather than motorway services, twists and turns rather than dull straight lines, a few cars and the odd holiday-bound caravan rather than endless convoys of trucks – and the CC can nip past those with a wide margin of safety when the road straightens for a while, thanks to that punchy performance and five beautifully spaced gears. You won’t be stopping too often either, except perhaps for cream tea or an ice-cream, because the efficient 2-litre four-cylinder 206 CC promises a combined economy of more than 35mpg, or around 350 miles per tankful.

From the edge of the moor the A39 by-passes Barnstaple over the River Taw, skirts the huge beaches of Braunton and Westward Ho!, down past Clovelly and Bude, past the ruins of King Arthur’s castle at Tintagel, and finally off the A39 at Wadebridge, to the new must-do watering hole of Rock, in the rolling dunes on the northern side of Padstow Bay.

It’s the perfect place to park up the CC, put up the roof, take out the flip-flops and swimming cossie, and just chill out. And like the CC, it offers a choice of moods, because in their way Padstow and Rock, separated by nothing more than a ferry ride or a quick sail across the shimmering blue water, are as different as Coupe and Cabriolet – the bustling town with its working harbour versus the endless beaches and the idyllic sailing. Decisions, all the time, decisions, but at least with the 206 CC you decide. And all in all, it’s hard to see how much else you could pack into one small but perfectly formed package...