One number on the spec sheet just cost a Peugeot dealer 33,749 euros
A driver said his Peugeot e-2008 went barely 160 km. The court ran its own WLTP test, got 282 km, and ordered the dealer to take the car back. Dealers, take notes.
This is the kind of ruling dealers will remember. A Peugeot e-2008 owner just got his contract cancelled by a German court after proving something brutally simple — the car never reached its advertised range, even on a standardised test. This is no longer the complaint of a disappointed buyer. It is a legal precedent.
The EV was bought in 2021. The dealer’s paperwork and Peugeot’s own materials listed a WLTP range of 332–341 km. In real life, the owner squeezed out about 160 km — and that was mostly city driving, no aggression, Eco mode on. The dealer refused to acknowledge a defect. The case went to court.
The deciding factor was not emotion. It was an independent technical inspection. On the court’s instruction, the car was run under conditions reproducing the 2021 WLTP protocol. The best result on the bench — 282 km. Roughly 18% below the lowest advertised figure. The judges considered the gap significant and applied a logic already familiar from combustion-car disputes: if real consumption or range deviates from the spec sheet by more than 10%, that is enough to talk about a defect.
The attempt to blame natural battery degradation fell flat. The court estimated that a reasonable loss for this scenario would sit around 2.5% per year — and what the test showed was clearly worse. The ending was predictable. The seller was ordered to take the car back and refund 33,749.95 euros plus interest. At the current rate that comes out to roughly $39,300.
Do not stretch this into a universal verdict. The court did not say every EV must hit its WLTP figure in winter, on the motorway, or fully loaded. WLTP remains a lab benchmark for comparing models against each other. But when a car fails even a test that closely mirrors that standard, the manufacturer’s numbers stop being harmless marketing — they become a promised characteristic of the product.
A similar approach has already surfaced in France: a Toulouse court forced a dealer to refund a Peugeot e-Partner that could not deliver its advertised route. One key element there was that the seller had not clearly explained to the customer how real-world range differs from the table value.
For buyers, the practical takeaway is simple. Complaints about “it doesn’t go far enough” work better as documents than as emotion. Charging history, trip conditions, temperature, mileage, battery health, independent diagnostics — that is the working kit. For dealers, the takeaway is even simpler: selling an EV on the back of one beautiful WLTP figure has become dangerous.
This story does not cancel WLTP. It makes it more serious. If the number made it into the catalogue, the court now has every right to ask why the car never reached it.