I think I can pinpoint the
time when my fascination with the internal combustion engine started. I was
about six and I had been invited to a friend’s birthday party at Dublin Zoo,
which was pretty exciting in itself.
But further excitement was
provided by the fact that his father would drive us there – something that I
found terribly exotic because my
father, a somewhat eccentric Luddite, refused to have a car.
The apogee of excitement,
however, came with the car that my friend’s dad was driving. It was a black
Citroen DS, sleek, futuristic, with a ride as smooth as velvet and – this was
the thing that captured my imagination – it rose up when it took to the road
and, in a sense, knelt down when it poured forth us very little boys at the
gates of the Zoo.
The friend’s dad was, I seem
to remember, an architect. He wore a bow tie and smoked what I later realised
were Gitanes. The Citroen DS, with its positively space age technology and that
seriously funky steering wheel, was just the car for such a bloke.
The DS came back into my life
briefly in the 1970s when I used to travel around the conifer county of Surrey
in a venerable sky-blue limousine version (in the front), but that’s another
story
As a teenager, I coveted the
Citroen-Maserati SM (we tend to forget that Citroen used to own a chunk of
Maserati). Citroen did the comfort while Maserati provided the power in the
form of a 2.5 litre fuel-injected engine. There was a silver one parked outside
the old Royal Hibernian Hotel on Dawson Street regularly and I used to drool
over it while heading to Graham O’Sullivan’s for coffee, Gitanes smoke (there’s
a theme here) and angst-ridden chats with my school mates.
Citroen lost its way in more
recent years. After the CX (1974-1991) and the XM (1989-2000) the brand
collapsed into blandness, dubious dependability and somewhat tinny build
quality. The quirky, eccentric, forthrightly Gallic originality of Citroen’s
core values was lost to the likes of the Xantia (which I strongly suspect you
can’t picture in your mind; I struggle to do so).
Well, times have changed and
Citroen, the old Citroen spirit, is back. I drove three models recently and all of
them had, for a start, a solidity and quality of build that had been
conspicuously absent from the brand for yonks. I know I tend to go on about it,
but when I close the driver’s door, I want to hear a certain sound. Ideally a
bass-toned clunk. I got it with all three Citroens.
The new "DS" theme involves Citroen’s renewed embrace of clever, original design to give the models in question a certain
extra je ne sais quoi.
First there was the DS3
Cabriolet, a sprightly little 1.6 litre petrol engined two-door with a roof which retracts the whole
way, exposing a great deal of sky above one’s noggin. I didn’t spend a lot of
time in this mode, due to the Winter we have been experiencing but I can
confirm that you can see a lot of sky.
Whingers have complained that
you can’t see out the back window when the roof is fully retracted. I would
argue that this doesn’t actually matter, provided you know how to use your wing
mirrors.
The 118bhp engine is lively,
with a surprising amount of oomph even from low revs and it is certainly a lot
of fun to drive. On the flip side, it’s not entirely sure-footed on some of our
less than smooth roads and there can be a bit of hoppity, skip and jump when
cornering.
This is a small, neat car but
nevertheless it gets 5 stars in Euro NCAP crash test and comes with 6 airbags.
Then I switched to the DS5
which is somewhere in the same category as the Passat or, perhaps, the Audi A5.
It’s certainly stylish. Those sculpted twin exhausts look wonderful and the
cabin feels very much designed as a unit rather than mixed up from standard components.
It’s elegant, tactile, with hints from the aviation sector.
The 158bhp 2.0 litre diesel I
drove is sprightly too and very much more than adequate to haul the fairly
considerable weight. My only real gripe was the ride. It’s probably fine on the
smooth roads of European neighbours. In Ireland, and especially outside the
city, every bump is acutely felt and, like the DS3, there’s a slight lack of
sure-footedness on tight bends where the surface is less than billiard-table
smooth.
Overall, including a fair
amount of motorway driving, I averaged somewhere in the high 40s in terms of
mpg (I think in old money, I’m afraid.)
And then… and then came the
revelation, the C4 Picasso (no DS this time) with its Tardis-like qualities. At first glance,
it’s a moderately sized MPV. Quite neat, rather understated in terms of design
but aerodynamic if deceptively like a normal car sitting on a booster seat.
But inside, it’s a very
different story. The C4 Picasso, once you sit into it, is huge. The sense of
space is almost bizarre and yet, when you drive it, it handles like the size it
really is.
The 1.6 HDi engine, which I
expected to struggle with all that, well, all that sense of space is more than
up to the job while delivering fuel consumption, in my case at any rate, pushing
into the high 60s in terms of mpg.
Being an MPV, you don’t tend
to drive it like the other two cars mentioned above but, notwithstanding that,
I reckon it has a lot less body roll than most MPVs and the ride is supremely
comfortable.
In fact, just to make another
foray into my childhood, my uncle had a Rover 3.5 P5 in 1970 and I remember
sinking into the seats with a sense of luxury that was rare indeed when one’s
benchmark was the Ford Anglia or the Fiat 125.
Well, sitting in to the
driver’s seat in the C4 Picasso that memory came back to me. Let’s just say
that I was impressed.
And I’m not the only one. The
C4 Picasso is Irish Car of the Year 2014.
