27 Jul 06
Who said modern cars are soulless machines? Our long-term test Citroen C4 VTS 180 was anything but. It knew it was leaving 4Car's care, and to show its disapproval of the parting it threw a strop on its very last day with us.
I was driving back from Rockingham Speedway, where I had been driving the new Honda Legend for the 4Car road test. (Don't worry, the road test was conducted on the road as well as on the track.) It was a hot day, albeit not as searing as the last couple of weeks, and the air-con decided it had had enough of delivering chilled air. Ambient was the best it could manage.
Then, when I tried to select a different CD track, the CD stacker crashed. On restart I was back to CD one, track one. I tried this several times, with different CDs placed in different slots, and still it was disobedient. Too late, I thought, you're off to a new life tomorrow.
It's a pity the C4 besmirched its record at the last minute. Up to then it had behaved pretty well, with nothing ever actually going wrong even if there were a few wobbles during the one year and 8705 miles it was with us. So, what wobbled? A piece of windscreen trim came loose, and stayed that way even after the windscreen was replaced following a chip which grew into a two-foot crack (hardly the C4's fault). The passenger's outside door handle took to staying pulled out when opened, preventing the door from shutting unless pushed back in. A squirt of WD40 fixed that.
And there were some spurious messages on the dashboard display sometimes. The C4 is meant to need a service only every 20,000 miles, or maybe every 10,000 if the usage is particularly arduous. But right at the end it suddenly seemed to suggest that a service was 3400 miles overdue, unless '-3400' and a flashing spanner sign means the service is due in 3400 miles' time. And the usage wasn't hard at all. The total mileage was low for the year, true, but the miles it did were usually for decent-length journeys with a fully warmed-up engine.
