Peugeot outs 308 R HYbrid

It's not often that the CEO of a car-maker Tweets images of his boss testing a top-secret model, but that's exactly what's happened with Peugeot's 308 R HYbrid.

Overnight, Peugeot CEO Picat Maxime posted these two images of his boss, PSA Peugeot Citroen CEO Carlos Tavares, with a semi-disguised 308 prototype on his official Twitter account.

Normally, we'd assume the car in question is simply a pre-production version of the new 200kW/330Nm 308 GTi hot hatch, which made its global public debut at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on the weekend.

Except that in this case the images were accompanied by the words: "Looks like #Peugeot308RHYbrid is ready to move! Today our CEO Carlos Tavares enjoyed its radical performance!"

There's only one conclusion to draw from this — that Peugeot is working on a hotter 308 than the GTi, which will cost more than $50,000 when it arrives in Australia later this year, and it could be powered by the same 368kW electrified all-wheel drive powertrain seen in the 308 R HYbrid concept car that debut at the Shanghai motor show in April (pictured here in blue).

Not to be confused with the 308 R concept which previewed the 308 GTi at last year's Frankfurt show (pictured here in red/black), the 308 R HYbrid combined that car's 200kW 1.6-litre turbo-petrol engine with an 85kW electric motor on the front and rear axle.

With a total output of 368kW and a mammoth 730Nm of torque, the result was claimed to be 0-100km/h acceleration in four seconds flat and a top speed of 250km/h, while the plug-in hybrid concept was claimed to emit just 70g/km of CO2.

That not only makes the plug-in hybrid 308 R HYbrid vastly quicker than the 308 GTi (0-100km/h in a claimed six seconds), but AWD hyper-hatchbacks like the Volkswagen Golf R (206kW/380Nm), Ford's upcoming Focus RS (257kW/470Nm), Audi's upcoming RS 3 Sportback (270kW/465Nm) and Mercedes-AMG's upgraded A 45 (280kW/465Nm).

Heck, it would even eclipse the benchmark-setting 294kW output of the leaked AMG A 45 S, which is expected to lower the standard A 45's new yardstick 0-100km/h pace of 4.2 seconds.

Of course, final specifications of the 308 R HYbrid are yet to be announced, but if the concept of the same name is any guide, they will be epic.

Riding on 80mm-wider front and rear tracks and 19-inch wheels with 235/35 tyres, the 308 R PHEV concept incorporated multiple driving modes.

For normal use, ‘Road’ mode produced 221kW of power and a maximum of 400Nm of torque. In this mode the driver gets full petrol power and some boost from the rear electric motor only.

‘Track’ mode brought into play the front electric motor, offering 294kW/530Nm under acceleration, while the full 368kW/730Nm was unleashed in ‘Hot Lap’ mode, which employed all three power units.

Peugeot said the 308 R HYbrid could run in pure-electric ZEV mode but it’s unknown for how long or how far, and it claimed its 3kWh lithium battery took just 45 minutes to fully charge using a fast-charger.

The car in the images Tweeted by Maxime appears to bear no external design differences to the production 308 GTi, but if it's half as exotic as the R HYbrid concept beneath its discreet exterior, Peugeot's plug-in hybrid 308 R could set a new hot-hatch performance standard.