As promised, it’s soft-riding. On many or even most roads, wonderfully so.

The suspension’s trick is to use extra hydraulic reservoirs that bleed through progressively smaller holes as the damper reaches the ends of its travel, either in compression or extension. It means the Aircross can have extremely soft springs in the centre of the travel to keep it comfy on normal surfaces, but it maintains control when things are really rough.

Sure enough, much of the time it wafts along as if borne on air, especially on medium-smooth surfaces. It’s an odd mix, though, because bad sharp edges will send a clang into the body, and there’s a bit of steering column quiver too.

Add that quiver to the light steering, and the Aircross can feel a little wispy. A Touran, which proceeds by more solid-sounding thuds and thumps and has stiffer steering, feels heavier. Some people prefer that German solidity, some the French levity.

So does all that softness translate into a vague steer? Not if you drive smoothly. Twitch the wheel and you can get out of phase with it. But if you pour it through bends progressively, it answers accurately and can make brisk progress.

Roll is certainly a thing, but if you’re expecting a drunk’s unsteadiness, you’ll be surprised at how resolute it is. It’s also largely resistant to understeer, especially the petrol, which is 100kg-plus lighter than the 180bhp diesel.

So yes, the steering’s very light as well as indirectly geared. Pressing the sport button (an incongruously labelled thing in a car with this mission) dials in a little extra weight, but it’s just a false inertial resistance rather than a plausible reduction of assistance. At least the featheriness of the steering matches the pedals – it’s a car you caress rather than wrestle.

It’s quiet. At a cruise that’s down to well-supressed tyre noise, and on acceleration the engines keep their peace. The 2.0 diesel and 1.6 petrol are the top pair and both make 180bhp. They both do 0-62 in the eights, but it’s the petrol that feels the more eager.

Both come with an eight-speed autobox as standard. It’s a bit fidgety in the petrol, especially in sport mode, so you might just press an M button and get manual control via paddles. Well, they’re little switches really, mounted on ears behind the steering wheel.

If you don’t have to deal with loads or hills, the cheaper 1.2-petrol-plus-manual combo should be surprisingly pleasant and keen. That’s based on our experience in the Peugeot 3008, mind, as we haven’t tried it in the Aircross yet.

As for the plug-in hybrid - it gets a 13.2kWh battery, so claimed electric range is around 34 miles. You’ll get a little less than 30 in mixed driving. In EV mode the C5 is very quiet and very smooth, though you may notice a few pulses in the power delivery as the eight-speed auto sorts itself out. There is regen-braking, with a ‘B’ mode for the transmission that harvests as much energy as it can when you’re braking or coasting. The brakes themselves are a bit springy and grabby at low-speeds, such is the hybrid way.

It’s not immediately obvious the engine’s started unless you really clog it, which you won’t need to do very often because there’s more than enough low-down. Most of the time it fires up quietly and without any vibration through the steering wheel, pedals or seat. Usually this happens at speed, so what little noise it makes is masked by wind and tyre-roar.

When you’re low on e-juice the engine is on more of the time, obviously. But the C5 is good at shutting it off as often as it can – when you’re braking or coasting up to a junction, stopped at the lights or even pulling away from a standstill.

The driver-assist on the top-spec Aircross will ease you along the centre of a motorway lane and keep your following distance to the car in front, and in the auto it runs right down to stop-go traffic. It works just as smoothly, and just as not-smoothly, as the best systems in rivals. So usual caveats apply: don’t cede control.

Active safety braking is standard on all, which you’d expect, and so’s blind-spot warning, which you wouldn’t.