• Big, comfortable and supportive seats
• Interior quality is good, but not outstanding
• Light and airy, especially with panoramic roof

How is the quality and layout?

Citroen’s build quality has taken a huge leap forward since the early 2000s. The C5 Aircross sports a good range of soft-touch plastics and pleasant upholstery – and it feels well put together. It’s not quite at the pointy end of its class, though. The Hyundai Tucson and Kia Sportage both feel a little more upmarket.

Unlike Citroens of old, the layout isn’t particularly zany. The only real annoyance is that the heating is controlled via the touchscreen. Thankfully, there are some physical buttons for most other functions including an old-school volume dial.

Citroen, along with most companies that do without physical buttons in their cabins, expect you to make use of voice control to adjust the heating. However, in the Aircross the options aren’t very helpful, allowing you only to increase or decrease by a degree centigrade at a time.

Another minor bugbear is the cupholder location. There are two that hold bottles of decent sizes, but they’re both located between the driver and the gear lever in manual cars. This makes it difficult to change gears.

Infotainment and technology

When Citroen facelifted the C5 Aircross in 2022, it gave the car a new, larger 10.0-inch infotainment system. It was teamed with more responsive hardware and a standard sat-nav on all trims. It’s certainly an improvement over the car’s old system, but it can’t match up to the systems found in Hyundais and Kias.

Part of the issue with Citroen’s infotainment is that its menu design is a little confusing. It’s also worth pointing out that you can’t use all 10.0-inches of the screen to view what you’ve selected. That’s because the temperature settings for the standard two-zone climate control are displayed on either side of the screen (see below), effectively giving you a much smaller display for maps or music.

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You also get a standard 12.3-inch digital instrument display that can be configured to show a wide range of data, such as fuel consumption or, in hybrid models, the energy flow between the petrol and electric portions of the powertrain. It’s quite an ugly system – there isn’t a twin-dial aping menu screen and all the data is housed in large, turquoise blocks. Volkswagen’s system is much better.

Comfort

• ‘Advanced Comfort’ front seats are excellent
• One of the most comfortable non-luxury cars
• PHEV is the quietest option

Keen drivers might not warm to the C5 Aircross’ unsporting nature, but it makes up for that by delivering comfort in spades. We’ll discuss ride quality in the next section, but we simply must mention the car’s squidgy front seats here.

They’re uncannily comfortable, yet they offer plenty of support for your lower back. That means they remain comfortable, even after spending hours at the wheel. The driver’s seat also lines up well with the steering wheel, so you don’t get cramp from sitting skew-whiff.

Refinement is good mainly, although you’ll feel a few tremors and hear a bit of a thrum from the three-cylinder petrol engine. If you want the quietest experience possible, the plug-in hybrid is the one to go for. It’s near silent in electric mode – and the C5’s sound deadening manages wind and road noise well.