In the end we got the RCZ, which wasn’t bad either
Concept cars are naturally supposed to think ahead, but Peugeot invented our ideal ’emotional support bubble’ back in 2000. The Peugeot 607 Feline Concept saluted the birth of a brand new millennium at the Geneva Salon and did so with a rather blank grin on its face. It was the start of a new grille design for the company. With which they immediately paved the way for brands like BMW, which immediately put the whole thing at 11. Well, that’s another story. It was flanked by two insanely large headlights, suggesting that they were in a contest of ‘who has the most luminosity?’ wouldn’t avoid the sun.
Unlike most concept cars, which are unveiled to give you the mouth-watering look of a ferociously attractive model that never turns out to be so stylish in production practice, the Peugeot 607 Feline only came under the hood a few months after the 607 went on sale. the cloth. Maybe the designers were slightly delayed by a nasty millennium bug – we’ll never know. It was shown alongside the Paladine, another 607-based concept, now in the form of a luxury limo.
The engine in the Peugeot 607 Feline
The Feline had the French firm’s ES engine, a 2,946 cc V6 originally developed with Renault and tickled by Porsche in 2000 to 207 hp. Gosh. It was longitudinally behind the five-speed manual, to achieve that extreme wheel-on-every-corner look that gives the car such a distinct and impressively sporty stance gives.
A kind of French Batmobile
The mercilessly red interior was overgrown with leather, but surprisingly minimalistic by today’s standards – and thought doors unnecessary. That did cause some problems with banal things like ‘getting in and out’. Something about that was found because part of the body disappeared into the sides, the windscreen slid 50 centimeters forward over the hood and the rear window slid 12.5 centimeters backwards. The cabin looked straight out of a 1960s Batman movie. The pedals and steering wheel were adjustable for the driver. There were even compartments for your shoes if you didn’t want to get your upholstery dirty.
The Peugeot 607 Feline became the RCZ – more or less
French car makers have long endured large, expensive sedans and idiosyncratic sports cars, which had in common that no one really wanted to buy them. The closest you could get to this two-seat 607 concept was the RCZ. This was a smaller, less ambitious but quite entertaining 2+2 that was on sale from 2009 to 2015. (In 2010 he even made it to TG Coupe of the Year.)
Perhaps Peugeot suggested with the two 607 concepts in luxury and sporty version that you should buy a car that was both. With the clear pointe that the 607 was that car. Unfortunately, the buying public again disagreed. Traditionally, the only ones who buy large Gallic battleships have been the French government and action film directors of the 1990s. Who knows what would have happened if the real 607 had taken the form of the Feline…
