DS Automobiles No 8 - long-term review

The DS No.8 is a bit weird. Deliberately so, and I’m here for it. It’s not quite a saloon and not really an SUV - there’s definitely not much ‘sports’ in its utility - but also a medium-level ride height that has plenty of people staring. Presumably working out what the hell they’re looking at. Bluff nose with a perspex ADAS panel, daggerish foot-long indicators, jewel-like LED headlights. A black bonnet and roof which are vaguely Maybach, high, thick sides and a long rear glass with a kind of floating shark fin in the rear three-quarter, falling away into a square rear with more oversized lighting elements.

It’s quirky, but not necessarily über avant-garde. The wheels are definitely a bit boring for the rest of the look, although my opinion may be coloured by the fact that they are excessively dull to clean. But my first impressions are that I quite like it - even if ‘love’ would be a strong push.

So what about other first impressions? Well, the interior looks odd at first but resolves well. Nice seats with massaging/heating and ventilation. A weird but fun four-spoke and vaguely nautical wheel, big touchscreen in the middle. Good storage, lovely detail. But behind that is a system that suffers from slightly glitchy and wonky operation and hierarchy. Prod the up button for the drive modes, for instance, and it’ll go up. Then down, then two up, then down. Almost like it has water in the connection.

The heated windscreen button doesn’t light up (maybe it doesn’t work?), and the haptic all-of-a-piece bar under the main screen works two out of three presses. At which point you inevitably re-press and the laggy screen does multiple things at once. OK, it’s not a deal-breaker, but for a near £70k car (£69,190 as tested), it’s not good enough, and it’s where I have the shortcuts set up for the unwanted ADAS (lane change and sign assist). Oh, and the gear selector is the same as in a Fiat Panda. Something probably only a motoring journalist would notice or care about, but there you go.

Power-wise, the speed is fabulous and well-judged for the size. Plenty of punch for overtaking, nicely balanced when you have to pull smartly out of a junction. Yes, it feels 95 per cent front-wheel drive - unless you lock it into 4x4 mode - but this isn’t a sports car or even a particularly sporting car, so it needs to be judged in context, and the way it puts down and maintains traction is pretty good, all told.

There does seem to be some disconnect with what the No.8 is going for and what it actually achieves, mind. The road-scanning suspension doesn’t seem to work - it’s no better than a well-set up passive system - and no matter what mode it’s in, it’s soft. That could be forgiven if the ride was ultra-pillowy, but it’s not. But more on that in a later update.

As for initial workings out, so far, in the (until recently) middling temperatures of 2026, I’ve been seeing 320 miles of real-world range, maybe 20-or-so more if run for a longer trip in Eco mode. Which makes absolute sense, because if a 97.2kWh battery is running 3.3mi/kWh (which is what I’ve been averaging), that’s exactly 320.76 miles before we’d become a pretty brick. Even a couple of runs down to Gatwick (144 miles each way) have been completed without fuss. Which is pretty much as far as I’d likely go without some sort of charging.

We’ll cover my roaming charges in a bit more detail next time, but so far, it’s not been the most sprightly. We’ve never been anywhere near the 160kW peak, and averages are more like 70-ish. Could have been the chargers, but we’ve been on a few. So it’s a mixed bag in the first two months of DS Automobiliing. But at least there’s plenty to talk about.