DS Automobiles No8 review: Chanel should lodge a complaint
The DS No8, a new electric saloon, has a name derived from a well-known luxury fragrance. But this isn’t a driving experience the well-heeled will appreciate
It still feels like the start of a DS Automobiles review requires a bit of an explanation about the brand, which, given it was launched as a standalone carmaker 11 years ago, perhaps says something about how well things are going.
DS began as a label for a new luxury trim within Citroën — think what Ghia was to Ford, or later its ill-fated Vignale versions — and got its name from the 1955 Citroën DS (saying the letters “DS” in French sounds like “déesse”, meaning goddess), a beloved classic with an unforgettably avant-garde design and clever super-soft hydropneumatic suspension. It was then spun off as a standalone brand, retaining comfort, elegance and technology as its core values.
Large sales volumes are not what DS is after, really, but even so it might have been hoping to shift more than 1,015 cars in the UK last year. Bentley managed 993, for goodness’ sake, while another relative newcomer in the same space, Polestar, sold nearly 17,000, and it only makes fully electric cars. To be fair, DS only had one model on sale last year, but still.
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The company will be hoping what it calls “phase 3” finally helps it gain a foothold throughout Europe, with three new models coming this year. The first is the one you see here, the DS No8, the brand’s new range-topper, a high-riding executive electric saloon.
We’re told the name is a nod to other brands in the luxury space, which we know to mean specifically Chanel’s No 5 fragrance, so DS clearly wants us to think of it in the same ultra luxury and haute couture space. Sadly the No8 falls short of that high watermark and, actually, will struggle to steal customers away from even premium brands like Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Lexus.
Let’s start with the design. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I recently described a Kia as an eyesore, though a couple in the comments section disagreed vehemently. I wondered if they might have been Kia salespeople.
The DS No8 is far from ugly, and there are some lovely details, but take a step back and soak it all in, and to my eyes it is a little… awkward. You can dress it up as avant-garde all you like but it’s not what I would describe as beautiful. From any angle.
The cabin is arguably even more problematic. The leather seats with their watch strap design look and feel exceptional, for sure, and the ones up front have not just heating, ventilation (cooling) and multiple massage functions, but also vents to blow warm air on your neck — something I’ve only ever seen in convertibles in the past.
And there are plenty of pleasing details, such as the illuminated light burst pattern on the attractive double-decker centre console, and the contrast stitching in the door linings. The (optional) panoramic glass roof is impressive too and has solar tinting to prevent the cabin overheating, and you notice that there are additional speakers mounted in the roof by Focal, for what it calls 3D sound. The 16in touchscreen and digital instrument panel look good, as does the four-spoke “X-format steering” wheel, and the Alcantara material on the dash feels upmarket.
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But there are also clear reminders that the DS No8 comes from the Stellantis group and is therefore part of the same family as the Vauxhall Astra — some low-rent plastics for the door bins, which are only partly felt-lined, as well as on the sides of the centre console.
On the infotainment front the touchscreen isn’t as feature rich as what others are now offering. A Mercedes I tested recently (review to follow) comes with download apps for the native operating system, and the Tidal app was built in so I could simply ask the car’s three AI systems (yes, three) to play songs by Queen and it did it. You can’t do that with the DS except via Android Auto or Apple Carplay. It’s not that the DS’s system is awful, it just feels a few years behind the best.
The technology side of the car can’t quite match the best, either. In Comfort mode the adaptive suspension uses a forward-facing camera to scan the road and set up the suspension accordingly, but the ride couldn’t be described as any better than a decent steel spring and damper set-up. DS held the UK launch of this car in Surrey and the local roads proved fairly broken up (are there other kinds these days?) so perhaps those who planned the routes imagined we’d be super impressed by the No8’s trick suspension. Below 30mph it is pretty clever, true, dropping the wheels down into ruts and lifting them up over bumps, but in other modes and at higher speeds the ride is far less composed and in fact the amount of roll and pitch is unusually high, even for a luxury barge. The classic DS roots were perhaps not meant to be felt quite so strongly.
Steering the No8 isn’t pleasant, either, with a spongy, inert feel through the wheel and a weird synthetic feel through the brake pedal, and I found it difficult to find a comfortable driving position. I’m tall and it felt like I was sitting a long way back from the front wheels. It was a bit like driving a hot rod, only less fun.
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It’s not notably refined inside, either. There’s acoustic glass but you get that on mid-sized Toyotas these days, and while the No8 feels quite hushed at low speeds you do notice wind noise on motorways.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about how far it can go on a charge. DS is making it available with standard (73.7kWh) and long-range (97.2kWh) batteries, offering up to 256bhp and 276bhp respectively, and with a 370bhp dual motor all-wheel drive option for the bigger pack. Officially the WLTP range is up to 466 miles on the front-wheel-drive DS No8 Long Range, which is lots, and DS has been refreshingly upfront about what happens to the range when on the motorway, going as far as to quote a highway range of 310 miles. Over a mix of roads I saw 3.4 miles per kWh in the FWD Long Range, which would mean about 330 miles in the real world.
When you need to plug in, it’s not slow, but while the really high-end EVs now offer 800v electrical systems with charging at up to around 350kW, the DS No8 tops out at 160kW. DS’s product man wanted us to focus on “sustainable charging levels”, meaning how long the maximum charging level can be sustained, and claimed that the No8’s 20-80 per cent in 27 min on a DC rapid charger means it can top up quicker than a Polestar 4. But 160kW is not exactly great for bragging rights at the 19th hole.
At least the DS No8 is priced fairly versus rivals like the Audi Q6 e‑tron, BMW i5 and Polestar 4, with costs rising from £50,790 up to £66,290 for the dual-motor model. But it’s difficult to see DS stealing many premium car owners from their usual brands based on this effort — it’s simply lacking in too many areas. Which means, sadly, that DS is likely to remain in obscurity for the foreseeable future.
