Citroen recovery would only provide a car for three days which we would have to return to a depot thirty miles away at our own expense and would not provide a courtesy replacement whilst the car was in. Then the electric sun roof failed, jammed open in the rain; we had to sit the car under a cover for two hours until the rain stopped.

Then the electric sliding doors failed, they wouldn't manually open and wouldn't close. To their credit they had seven goes at fixing the doors but sadly never succeeded. The air conditioning failed twice, and the ventilation fans failed completely twice. Had it been winter and the car needed demisting it would again have been unusable. The worst fault was when the electric sliding door which is supposed to have a safety roll back like electric windows accidentally shut whilst my wife was unpacking the car. The roll back failed the door, trapping her and causing bruising to her back. Citroen failed to find a fault.

The central computer display failed in that it locked on a single display, telling me child safety was active even if I turned it off. The electric memory seats loose their position and their memory. We spent several weeks with an airbag warning light coming on whilst in France (don't think Citroen France has any better reputation than Citroen UK).

UK garage kept the car another two weeks; they told us there was no fault and that there had been no fault recorded on the computer log then said the fault was with a seatbelt pretensioner unit. Difficult to see why this would give an airbag fault. It had initially three recalls which they managed to lump together, followed by another set of five. The car was with Citroen at the time of the second recall but sent back to us without the work being done; we asked Citroen UK to explain, but they said not to worry - the recalls didn't need doing.

We bought this car because of the five-star safety rating. It wasn't safe and it never worked. Citroen UK responded to all these problems by saying they had no obligation to replace the car, only to fix it when it went wrong. They also insisted they had no obligation to provide a courtesy car for the months it spent in their garage or to compensate for the loss of holiday, due to not having the car, general inconvenience or the costs incurred by us due to this lemon. They offered us a discount off the next service as a goodwill gesture.

Don't buy this car. Don't buy a Citroen at all. But if you do and you have problems, don't bother talking to Citroen UK: they don't care and you're just wasting your phone bill. And if you think this is just one dissatisfied customer, and if you can read French, go to the French autojournal website and read the lists of people who have had very similar experiences with C8's.