DS 7 E‑Tense 4x4 300 Opera | Long Term Review

From the outside at least, it does look as though it’s beginning to get an idea itself of exactly what DS Automobiles should be. Mission statements preach elegance and opulence infused with sporting pedigree and engineering excellence, but what does all of that mean? And how does the execution compare to that of brands we’ve come to know well, and of whose cars we generally know what to expect?

We are only now beginning to shift beyond the stereotypical mindsets that have long tarnished the buying habits of motorists. Ideas that French cars are badly made, Japanese cars quite the opposite, Italian cars horribly unreliable, etc., etc. And DS is busy trying to position itself within the minds of the wider market that this is a brand that is worth paying attention to.

The best way to do that is of course to deliver quality cars, and ten years into this adventure DS has managed to put together a recognisable and cohesive range of models that is distinctly DS. Any lingering scent of Citroën is now long gone, so the challenge is now to prove to buyers that these cars are worth their salt.

We’ve decided to undertake our own investigation into this mysterious French brand to figure out for ourselves exactly where it sits within an ever-expanding landscape of car manufacturers, with lines increasingly blurred between the luxurious, the practical and the affordable. For the next six months, we’re going to be putting the DS 7 through an extensive test, to see what it’s like to live with, and how it compares to rivals.

Photography by Joe Harding.

Update 8: Summer makes everything better

A few weeks ago I wrote about how varied the electric range on our long-term DS 7 has been. We’ve seen as low as about six miles indicated. But that was written from the perspective of our first few weeks, a time when it was pretty darned cold, even in the southernmost tips of the UK. Now it’s basically summer, so let’s revisit those numbers.

As we all know, batteries are affected strongly by the temperature and underlying weather patterns. So, in the winter months, EVs will have less range than in the summer. It’s why so much talk goes on about things like “preconditioning” in efforts to make sure consumers get as close as possible to the range that they purchased.

The more sophisticated cars out there will do this themselves if you set them right. Not only warming their innards up for the occupant to enjoy, but adding some heat to the batteries both before running and before charging to make sure they work at their best.

But when you’re just using a plug-in hybrid without really thinking about that kind of pre-planning, you’re at the whims of the weather. Seeing regular numbers on our temperature gauge with not only two digits, but two digits starting with a two, is gratifying.

So, what’s the outcome? Well, maximum range is the answer. No, it’s still not reaching its WLTP number of just about 30, but what car in the history of this measure has ever hit that? Instead, we’ve gained almost 50 per cent more full electric range than we were seeing before. 

The consistent number is 19. The DS 7 has been flashing 19 miles of range at the end of a charge without wavering for the last week, a week in which I have been religiously trying to charge it every day, running it in hybrid mode with the sat-nav running (muted, see update 6) to make sure that the energy is used as efficiently as possible over my c.60 mile round trip commute.

That has resulted in the mpg frankly rocketing, from hovering around the 40mpg area to easily cruising past 60. That’s the kind of mpg that makes having the plug-in hybrid version of the DS 7 finally a more economical prospect than my 2012 Audi A4 TDI. At which point, it is a genuinely sensible real work option. 

Turns out summer makes all of us happier, even our cars.

MPG this week: 64

Written by Ben Miles.

Update 7: Revved up by the rear design

It’s not often you get to spend some time looking at the back of your car. So, when we recently used our DS 7 long termer to shoot some tracking shots with a Porsche Cayenne that Simon was testing, I was intrigued to see what it looks like when in action.

I realise that “you don’t often get to spend some time looking at the back of your car” will, and should, immediately elicit the reply “just look at it when it’s parked.” But I’m sure if you take a second you’ll agree that a car sitting still looks very different to a car in motion.

So, while Simon drove the DS and I was ensconced in the driver’s seat of the Cayenne while Joe, our excellent photographer, did his work, I was intrigued to find just how much I actually like the DS 7’s design from the back.

I think it’s been well documented that DS is a brand with a good handle on its design ethos. We recently spent some time in a DS 4 in the south of France, and while it had its issues, the design is one of the best in its class. But some of the elements on the DS 7 do make it stand out from the crowd.

I’ll start with the lights. They look like bird feathers, with the patterned inserts almost mirroring the minor elements of said appendage. They come to a point on the inside blending into the single bar that includes the de rigueur appearance of the brand’s name in full. The fact that the DS’s logo is aesthetically pleasing just helps to set it all off. 

I also quite like the way that the rear number plate has been incorporated. The top line of the inset is carried on across the rest of the rear, and the lower section just blends into the bottom of the boot lid. 

Static, it looks good, in motion it looks even better. I can’t quite put my finger on why, perhaps because you get to see those elegant rear lights in full, but overall, I am even more of a fan than I was before.

MPG this week: 47.9

Written by Ben Miles.

Update 6: Four things I don’t like about our DS 7

For the first few weeks of our time with the DS 7 I have focused on a few positives and some general information. It’s always difficult when you’re living with a car for a while not to start seeing past its issues and looking upon them as quirks, but even if you do like a car, there are always some things that deep down would put you off, and that people should know about before they buy. Here’s a few things that have been sticking in the back of my head for a few weeks now.

The brakes

The Achilles heel of a lot of full EVs and hybrids over the last few years has been integrating the retardation of energy recovery, with honest, old-fashioned physical brakes. Engineers need to find a point where reasonably gentle energy recovery and physically gripping a disc come together as gently as possible so as not to upset the car while giving maximum stopping power.

Our DS 7 is one of the myriad cars that have yet to get this balance right. The regen is pretty intuitive. Use the pedal gently and you can modulate the slowing power (because regen isn’t really stopping power) to get maximum balance of coast and regen. But at some point you’re hitting the brake because a deer has run out into one of West Sussex’s country lanes, and that’s when things get less fun. 

Want to slow down properly? Well, I’m afraid you’re really going to have to punch the pedal like Tyson Fury. And even then there will probably be more travel than you would hope for before you find real slowing. Several times in the last couple of months I’ve hit the brake to avoid a car pulling out at the last minute only to realise we’re actually heading for a full collision and I need to really put my whole ankle through the bulkhead. 

The infotainment lag

The infotainment system on the DS looks quite nice. The big surround is a very strong design choice, standing proud of the dash and not hiding just how plastic it is. I kind of admire the boldness of just going with that.

But using it can become a source of frustration. Lag is the word. Every request seems to be followed by enough of a fraction of a second’s wait to be really frustrating. It’s not the kind of lag that precedes the classic blue screen of death on your PC, but one that just builds the frustration of something not quite working as it should do.

The sat-nav voice

Whoever wrote the script for the sat-nav was perhaps only faintly acquainted with how people speak. Every time the sat-nav chirps up again it’s like the most grating addition to the cabin possible. The fact that it seems a little dim-witted is just there to top the whole thing off.

I say this knowing that both I and most people reading this are firing up Android Auto or Apple CarPlay the moment they need to go anywhere. But from time to time either you’re out of signal or battery, or your phone just won’t communicate with the car and so you need to resort to the inbuilt sat-nav. And that’s the point you’ll want to remove your ears after about five minutes. Thankfully, there’s a mute button, but silencing your navigation instructions isn’t always useful.

Hybrid/engine wakeup time

This is a bit of a similar vein to the balance between physical braking and regen. Working out how to balance hybrid power and combustion engine on two axles without adding lag - where neither power unit is providing enough motivation - or too much power. The DS balances this quite well most of the time, but in one specific moment it really struggles. 

Imagine the scenario: you’ve just seen a gap at a busy roundabout big enough to get into with plenty of time, but it’s busy. You’ve got one chance to get into or you’ll probably be stuck there for the next decade. You put your foot down, begin to pull out and then a car hoves into view around the corner. As you press your foot further down… nothing happens. The DS tries to continue the movement through its electric power, but either it doesn’t have enough battery to fire all the motors, or it just can’t provide enough torque. What you really need is the engine to start up and just send you out and on your way. But actually, nothing. 

It’s caused more than the odd moment of slight panic, when the world seems to slow down and you wonder if you’re just going to end up slowly crawling across the face of oncoming, and angry, traffic. The engine then kicks in, but only after this moment of anxiety has risen through your chest and those around you have seen you lurch into the roundabout like a learner on lesson three. It’s intensely frustrating and feels like the kind of software and usability update that should be fixed early on in a car’s life. 

MPG this week: 60.1

Written by Ben Miles.

Update 5: I’m a sucker for sport mode

There is one button on our DS 7 I have pushed more than any other. In fact, it’s pretty much the first button I press every time I get into the car. It’s the drive mode selector, a rectangular rocker switch on the centre console that is used to engage sport mode.

Now, I drove the DS 7 4x4 360 on some gorgeous Italian roads last summer and that car changed my perception of what a bulky SUV can do in a corner, so I was intrigued to see how close our 300 model came to that same feeling.

It has the same suspension setup: MacPherson at the front and Multi-arm at the rear. In sport mode especially you can feel the poise it provides as it settles the whole car down and focuses the chassis on forward momentum rather than worrying about keeping passengers comfortable.

Any sense of excessive body roll that can be apparent in the standard or eco driving modes is instantly taken away, and really the compromise of comfort is not disastrous.

The result is a whole lot of fun from a car that, from the outside, looks like it has no right to offer. You can sling it into a corner and, while it doesn’t have quite the directness of the 360 (which among other things is 15mm lower in ride height), it’s pretty damn good at following your instructions.

The reality is of course that this is a car that still needs to work within its 1.8-tonne limitations. Even so, as near-two-tonne SUVs go, there are few around that handle quite like the DS 7.

Written by Simon Ostler.

Update 4: Clocking on

If you’re going to sell a car for north of £60,000, or more realistically, if you are going to call a car ‘luxury’ in any way, you better provide a proper way of telling the time.

We don’t mean just a nice digital readout on the inevitable touchscreen. That’s something we all get at the top of our phone – or if we buy a £5 Casio watch. No, this should be something that at least looks like it’s been thought about.

For our DS 7 that means a watch from BRM. Not the classic racing car manufacturer that likes to put too many cylinders in a small engine. But Bernard Richards Manufacture.

It seems only correct that the clock inside a DS, the historical brand of choice for the French establishment, is French rather than a tirelessly efficient Swiss timepiece. There’s something delightfully gallic about a French company that will only use French partners. Protectionism that doesn’t feel like it’s going to end the world.

The partnership between DS and BRM only began in 2016, then the DS 3 performance appeared at the Geneva Motor Show and had a watch alongside it. A limited edition piece to be sold to owners of the latest small, fastish hatch from not-Citroën.

That might not seem like a long time for a partnership we’re banging on about today, but French horologist Bernard Richards only started making his own watches in 2003. Before that, after attending the delightfully-named École d’horlogerie de Paris, he had made parts for the luxury watch industry. Striking out on his own BRM became something of a rapid hit, playing on a sort-of-faux racing history. In the end the company built up relationships with teams including Corvette, with whom it rather oddly sells a watch called “V12”.

The BRM in question today is an R180, and is standard on the upper levels of the DS 7 range. It’s a rectangular model that does very little to stray away from BRM’s usual fare – the hands have circular cutouts like the wheel on an Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 Stradale, the numbering picks out multiples of four, there’s a big shaded area in the centre of the face.

Do we like it? I think so. It is rather lovely to see the BRM rotating, without fuss, out of the dash every time you turn the DS 7 on. The only issue is that perhaps the racing stylings of the clock clash with the attempt at French luxuriance that the DS’s interior has. Or maybe it’s just adding a dash of je ne sais quoi?

What do you think of the DS’s BRM?

Written by Ben Miles.

Update 3: The times they car a… charging

The best thing about a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle is the ability to waft around on zero emissions when you’re doing most of your daily routine. The worst thing about some plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (other than PHEV being the worst acronym/initialism ever) is that if you live more than a certain distance from work and don’t have somewhere to charge it at home, that becomes slightly moot.

Our time with a long-term DS 7 will be littered with conundrums about charging. Who needs to charge it now? When was it last charged? What will we do when the charger nearest the office inevitably breaks? But this ongoing issue highlights possibly the second-best thing about a PHEV – no matter your electric range, you’re also carrying around an internal combustion engine to get you out of trouble.

Given the state of the charging infrastructure in certain parts of the country, carrying a spare petrol engine is a real boon. While there’s anxiety sometimes that constantly working on the old-fashioned motor is ruining our fuel consumption, at least we’re not getting that nagging fear of range anxiety.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not someone who complains about the range of modern EVs. I don’t think that most of us have regular journeys long enough to make that a real-world issue, and once you’re on the motorway a little careful planning means long trips are pretty simple. But having an EV range in our DS 7 that in February comes closer to 16 miles than 20 has meant that emissions motoring is massively outstripping zero-emissions.

In case you can’t tell right now, I’m not entirely sure where this weekly update is going. I like the zero emissions element of PHEV motoring, but really get annoyed by the numbers the car throws out when it’s run out of electric juice.

Perhaps I’ll get used to this over the coming months, perhaps I’ll have some kind of charging regime that means I bounce from Goodwood to home barely moving any pistons. But right now the frustration of being so close to an excellent solution, but so far is palpable. At the moment, this PHEV DS 7 is mightily close to being a petrol DS 7.

Written by Ben Miles.

Update 2: Comfortable cliches

Comfort is a byword for French car history. It is surely Citroën that is the most inextricably linked with the idea of a car that wafts you along beyond all others. It is, after all, a company that proudly designed a small car just after the war with a specific remit to cross ploughed fields.

But, perhaps the best emblem of this approach to car design was the Citroën DS. A car that not only approached its exterior design in a futuristic manner, but attempted to elevate ride from merely a feature to almost an artform.

Later Citroëns would continue its reputation for comfort. It even went as far as to have cars that delighted youngsters by mysteriously elevating themselves before they were driven, like a Harrier jet just reaching the end of its suspension before it took to the sky. But little could match the simple elegance of the DS. A car so stylish and smooth that it became as much a part of the French psyche as it was a popular machine. One is even said to have saved President De Gaulle’s life – the equivalent of a Jaguar saving Sir David Attenborough here.

So when DS was spun off as a brand of its own there was pressure. Pressure to preserve a long legacy, pressure to help a French car industry that wasn’t what it once was, but overall pressure to live up to that legend of comfort. As we received our long-term DS 7 at GRR towers, similar hopes pervaded through the office.

OK, that’s a bit of a lie, but a French car should mean that longer team or even personal journeys were about to get a whole lot nicer, right?

Well, to put that to the test I drove the DS 7 to Birmingham and back last weekend. Having taken the keys from our Web Editor Simon Ostler, I was interested to see just how comfortable this big DS would be. Perhaps it is the DS 9 that is best compared to that original DS (that after all being a large saloon bent on hitting a certain market), but if you stick a DS badge on a car then there is a certain expectation, right? Especially for those of us who have grown to have a particular fondness for many things French.

Did it live up to the potential? No. Of course it didn’t. But don’t misread me. I’m not saying it was bad. But was it up to the standard of an early DS? Of course it wasn’t. Modern cars have to deal with all sorts of extra things like weight, integrated hybrid systems and safety laws. They can’t just ignore the world around them to just concentrate on the person relaxing inside.

But was it comfortable? Yes. A cruise up the A3, M25 and M40 was dispatched without much sweat. The ride on a motorway deals with itself very well. It soaks up that awful concrete section of the M25, perhaps the downfall of many a modern cruiser, without real fuss or noise. At times it can struggle to be consistent when you leave the motorway, but that’s for another day. On the long travelling lanes it accounts for itself very well. The seats are nicely proportioned, the interior feels like a decent cocoon and the suspension, although not pillow soft, never ventures toward harsh. From my home to Birmingham and back is 270 miles, and its 270 miles that didn’t leave me cursing at the end, even if it was midnight. So that, I would suggest, is job done.

Written by Ben Miles.

Update 1: Getting to grips with the DS 7

The car we have on test is a DS 7 E-Tense 4x4 300 in Opera trim. That means it’s a plug-in hybrid petrol car with a turbocharged 1.6-litre, four-cylinder engine combined with an electric motor powered by a 14.2kWh battery.

It amounts to reasonable performance, and the best figures are achieved when you make use of the hybrid system that embellishes the power of the internal combustion engine with an infusion of electric shove. A sprint from 0-62mph takes 5.9 seconds, which feels spirited enough to make strong progress, on the way to a top speed of 146mph. Not the earth-shattering figures we’ve become accustomed to in cars that really ought not to be quite so violent in a straight line, and in some ways that’s a welcome relief.

We’ll dig deeper into what this car’s like to drive in later updates, but for now let’s spend some time thinking about what this car offers on a daily basis. We’re enjoying the Opera trim level, which currently sits below only the flagship La Premiere model in the DS 7 range.

Among a long list of standard tech is DS’s Iris infotainment system, featuring 3D navigation, visible through the 12-inch HD touchscreen display. There’s a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster, reversing camera, parking sensors, electrically adjustable heated and ventilated and massaging front seats, an electric panoramic sunroof, electric tailgate wireless smartphone charging and a pair of USB-C ports.

Our test car is also adorned with the ‘pearl grey’ interior option, a nice alternative to the black that always just feels a bit dark in cars these days.

There is one slightly confusing omission from the spec list, which is the heated steering wheel. I took delivery of this car during a particularly cold snap at the beginning of January, and never has the lack of a heated steering wheel been so sorely missed as it was here, especially in a car that at first glance appears to offer pretty much everything else.

Despite that admittedly minor peeve, there’s little we’ve found in our early experiences that has been amiss. The automatic headlights seem hell bent on sticking with full beam, even in the face of oncoming traffic, and the massaging seats give off a pretty distracting buzzing sound in certain settings.

However, the seats are comfortable, the driving position is easy to manipulate and the general feel of the interior is pleasant. It’s on a level with what you might expect from the best Volvo has to offer in terms of quality and comfort.

The cabin feels spacious, too, the front seats especially are afforded, if anything, too much room. It almost feels as though there’s a bit of wasted space in there, with relatively minimal space for storage. The rear seats are the biggest surprise. Even with the bulky panoramic sunroof in situ, there’s plenty of leg and headroom in the back for passengers in excess of six feet tall.

If you’re new to DS as a brand, the interior might be something of a shock at first glance, but if you can look beyond the excessive use of polygons the layout of the controls is convenient and logical. Little touches such as the rotating clock face above the touchscreen and the six-speaker Focal Electra sound system are also quietly appreciated, although the latter is a £1,000 option on Opera models.

Overall, initial impressions are good. There’s nothing unpleasant about driving the DS 7, in fact there’s plenty here that has made us keen to keep coming back for more. Stay tuned to hear more about our experiences with this car, next up we’ll be taking a closer look at exactly how this car feels to drive on some of the more rural roads around Goodwood.

Written by Simon Ostler.