Peugeot 205 Turbo 16
Why 3.3: Peugeot gutted its cheapest hatchback, mounted a turbo four backward behind the seats where the rear bench used to be, and won back-to-back WRC titles with the result. Only 200 built for homologation; today it's the most attainable of the Group B road cars, which is not saying much.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Mid-mounted and turned backwards, so the 1.8-litre turbo's induction and gear whine reach you through the bulkhead rather than the exhaust. But the road car was softened considerably from the rally version, and a boosted four offers little beyond the whistle.
4-cylinder · turbocharged · 7,000 rpm redline · rated 5.8 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €30k (1984) → €327k (2026), trending up · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
Built before ISOFIX existed, so there are no anchor points at all. A child seat here is a seatbelt installation in the only passenger seat there is.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The ordinary 205 GTI, sold in the hundreds of thousands, is a completely different car built to a completely different brief — front-engine, front-wheel drive, aimed at buyers who wanted a quick, cheap hatchback. The Turbo 16 shares only the silhouette: Peugeot Talbot Sport stripped the platform, mounted the engine backward behind the seats, ran it through a transaxle to all four wheels, and built exactly 200 homologation examples so the factory rally team could go racing. That team won the manufacturers' and drivers' titles in both 1985 and 1986, one of the most dominant stretches in Group B history, before the category was banned outright. The road cars inherited the mid-engine AWD layout and the general sense that this was a race car wearing a shopping-hatchback body, not a hot hatch with extra hardware bolted on. Values have climbed hard over the past decade as the wider Group B nostalgia wave lifted every car in this category, but the 205 T16 remains the relative bargain of the five — mid six figures instead of seven, for now. The ones still driven tend to show up at historic rally regularity events; everything else is a collection piece.