Car review: DS 3 Crossback, the familiar looking old friend with a bit of a personality transplant

Getting into the DS 3 Crossback again was like meeting an old friend I’d not seen for a while. There was a good deal that was very familiar and mostly likeable. The exterior for example, high-waisted and with that “shark’s fin” nick on the door pillar, very avant-garde and still distinctive, even though the model has been out for a few years. The door handles flip out to greet you as you approach the car, like an offer of a handshake. The bold front grille with the prominent stylised DS badge still looks a bit too much the car’s had Liberace-style plastic surgery to make it look like an Audi, an established premium brand – no surprise, I guess.

This is Stellantis/Peugeot Citroen Group’s premium brand, also sitting above sibling marque Citroen through related to it, and the interior of the top-of-the-range model I tried couldn’t be faulted for opulence. The “watch strap” leather is as soft and sumptuous as I remember it, and the dash is the same piano-black honeycomb of identical geometric shapes for buttons, bad for immediate recognition of function, but sophisticated-looking, you know. There are things, little things, that are still irritating, as you’d expect with an old acquaintance who never shall be forgot. The cruise and lane assist controls remain relegated to a pod behind the steering wheel, rather than within thumb-reach on the wheel itself.

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But the old friend, while looking very familiar, has had a bit of a personality transplant. Never the most raucous of company, even as a deeply unfashionable diesel, the DS 3 now has the option of an all-electric plug-in battery version. There’s a new name attached, too – E-Tense, which makes it sound a bit more forbidding than it is. It doesn’t make you tense, quite the opposite. As with all electric cars it is near silent in use and thus exceptionally refined, which is consonant with DS’s brand ambitions. The old friend has gone silent on you, but in a good way.

How far will the friendship go? They say maybe about 200 miles, but that seems ambitious in my experience. In normal springtime use I’d say it was closer to 130 miles with a anything like spirited driving, and it is a little depressing to see the available range on the dash shrink quite so rapidly at motorway speeds.

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The DS 3 Crossback is, though, reasonably class competitive, and that 130-miles-plus range should be enough for most users. It will take about 8 hours to recharge from a domestic dedicated external wall-mounted charger, and it took about 30 minutes for mine to get from 50 per cent to an 80 per cent charge at a commercial facility in a service station (though the electricity there costs about the same to go a given distance as petrol would – charging at home is much cheaper).

The list price of the DS 3 is around the same as the likes of the Hyundai Kona and Kia e-Niro, which it is broadly comparable to, but it has much more flair; against in-house electric competition such as the Peugeot e2008, mechanically identical, it makes less of a case for itself. Against the electric version of the Volvo XC40, it is something of a bargain; the new electric Mazda XC-30 would also be worth a look, with its unusual open cabin doors and excellent build. The DS 3 in E-Tense mode remains a pleasant companion, and is cheaper to take out for the day than it used to be, but it’s got competition for your attentions.