Written by Luke Wilkinson Published: 20 November 2023 Updated: 17 April 2024

Citroen’s C5 Aircross is a family SUV with unmistakably French style – it majors on comfortable cruising rather than peak performance, and is very well equipped with some of the latest technology, but does without any form of electrical power. Instead it uses a 1.2-litre petrol engine, but will its 130hp tally with the car’s otherwise premium feel, or will it be lacking in oomph for motorway-speed miles? Gareth’s going to spend the next six months finding out…

Reports by Gareth Evans

Update 1: Welcome to the Fleet

Introducing the Citroen C5 Aircross

Citroen’s family car offerings have improved dramatically over recent years, and I’m looking forward to exploring their current capabilities during the next six months as I get to know, and hopefully love, the C5 Aircross SUV.

Before we delve into the spec sheet itself, a little on what I’m expecting to find. First and foremost, I expect it’ll be a comfortable vehicle, with supple ride quality and cushy seats. I also predict the engine will be a highlight – it’s the 1.2-litre PureTech turbocharged petrol that’s won loads of fans over the years for its smooth, punchy power delivery and relatively low running costs.

And finally, I’m anticipating a car that’s easy to live with. It should be practical, easy to park and safe. So with those expectations in mind, let’s inspect the details of KW22 LZS.

It’s in mid-spec Shine specification, which means the following highlights from the spec sheet:

• Advanced ‘comfort’ suspension
• 19-inch alloy wheels
• Automatic LED headlights featuring self-switching high-beams
• Keyless entry and ignition
• Next generation comfort seats finished in leather-effect cloth
• Split boot floor
• 10-inch touchscreen multimedia system with six speakers, Bluetooth, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, USB connections and built-in sat-nav
• Electric parking brake
• Driver-assistance system featuring automatic braking, fatigue detection, traffic sign recognition, lane-keeping assist, blindspot monitoring and adaptive cruise control
• Front and rear parking sensors, rear-view reversing camera
• Sliding rear seats
• 580-litre boot

The 1.2-litre PureTech engine has 131hp and 230Nm of pulling power, which equates to a 0-62mph dash in 10.5 seconds. Fuel economy is a claimed 41.3mpg to 49.5mpg, while the petrol tank is 53 litres, which means a range of around 450 miles.

I’m fairly surprised at those figures given how big this vehicle looks, but despite its off-roader appearance, the C5 Aircross only weighs 1,537kg. It’s 4.5 metres long and just over 2.0 metres wide with the mirrors out, which should make it easy to park, too.

However, it does without all-wheel drive, so it’ll be interesting to see how it fares if and when we get some snowfall in my rural part of Northamptonshire. Tax isn’t particularly taxing either: You’ll pay £165 a year in VED (after a first year rate of £230), while company car drivers will be in for BIK payable at 33%.

Its list price is quite high though. As standard this car weighs in at £28,080, but I’ve got a couple of optional extras on board: the black metallic paint is £595, while the bi-tone alloys are another £225. Final on-the-road price? £28,900.

Curiously, Citroen isn’t currently offering a PCP deal on this car direct from its website at the moment. But lease deals start from around £400 per month for a standard car, which means it’ll be a few quid more than that in the spec you can see here.

I’m excited to run this flight of French fancy to discover just what life’s going to be like. I’ll be doing some decent miles in it over the coming months, including the possibility of a trip back to its homeland to visit some relatives. Bring it on…

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Update 2: Three thousand miles in

A dirty Citroen C5 Aircross highlights some wintery pros and cons

I’ve covered a few thousand miles in the Citroen C5 Aircross now, and it’s capably navigated me through freezing conditions over Christmas and January. In the main I’m enjoying life with this family SUV – I appreciate its seats and suspension, both of which have been optimised for comfort rather than performance.

But the clever bit is that it doesn’t roll around like you may expect either, keeping itself coolly controlled in corners. This predictable nature helps me to position the car accurately in bends, my passengers remaining unflustered and unaffected as I do so.

There aren’t many SUVs that manage such subtly, and I think it’s to be commended.

Time to talk grime…

Running it through winter has been an interesting exercise, too. There’s one thing you can bank on each and every year: road grime. It seems to get everywhere, making it nearly impossible to keep a car clean, and black paint suffers this worse than almost any other shade or colour.

Muck on the roads inevitably finds its way to the windscreen, which in turn has caused me to go through a whole bottle of washer fluid already. This isn’t unusual, but the washer jets on the wiper blades are – and I think this is a very neat touch on the C5 Aircross.

They ensure the water always goes where it needs to, just in front of the blade, and it also provides great coverage and less screen wash wastage.

I’m less enamoured with the front door design, though. A huge amount of mud builds up between the sill and the bottom of the doors, and this dirt has an uncanny way of ending up below the knee of my trousers unless I concentrate very hard on missing it when I get out of the car. A minor bugbear perhaps, but still somewhat annoying.

Still, the car warms up and thaws out in decent time when the mercury drops really low. We’ve had a few evenings below minus five centigrade where I live, and within five minutes it’s safe to start driving after a cold start.

Delving into the online configurator, I was surprised to note that heated seats aren’t an option on this car either, regardless of trim level you pick. Sure, this is a creature comfort, but I have to say, in sub-zero conditions it’d be most welcome.

My final thing to note at this juncture is that I got a puncture. It was completely unavoidable – a tiny wood screw picked up somewhere or other had pierced through the tread of the tyre and deflation resulted. The odd thing here was how I found out, though: it was only walking past the car on the drive after I’d arrived home that I noticed a hissing sound.

I hadn’t noticed anything different in the way it drove, but plugging in my air compressor confirmed that pressure had dropped from the advised 36PSI to a lowly 16. Time to get some help. It was fixed in 20 minutes by Tony at Oundle Tyres, costing a grand total of £24, so that aspect was a welcome relief.

However, I can’t help wondering why the tyre pressure warning system didn’t activate and let me know something was amiss… in my experience these systems are often too sensitive, not the other way around! I’ve approached Citroen for a comment on this but they’ve yet to respond at time of publication.

Still, there are some longer trips on the cards for the C5 Aircross soon. I’m off up to the Lake District and coming back the very same day. That should be a brilliant test of the Citroen’s cruising capabilities. Tune in next month for the report.

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Update 3: Long day to the Lake District… and back

Gareth’s been battling the M6 a bit too much for his liking recently

My weekends are becoming evermore valuable as time goes by, which is the primary reason I’d decided to drive to my nephew’s first birthday party in the Lake District and back again in a single day. From my house in Northamptonshire it’s roughly 215 miles each way, which set the scene perfectly for my biggest day yet in the driver’s seat of the Citroen C5 Aircross. A great chance to find out what this French family friendly SUV had to offer in the comfort department.

Setting off with a full tank of fuel at 8am to give ourselves every chance of arriving before the 1pm start time, I set the destination in Google Maps using voice control (I use this a lot now) and set off, steeled for a long day.

We trundled up the A14 with the adaptive cruise control set to 70mph, the car smoothly adjusting its speed to that of the vehicle ahead when there wasn’t space to overtake. It started well.

Is the Citroen C5 Aircross a one-tank wonder?

Joining the M6 right at its most southerly junction, the Catthorpe Interchange, we headed to The North. I was secretly hoping we’d cover the trip in a nice, round single tank – one of my few criticisms of this car being the somewhat lacklustre fuel economy of around 38mpg I’d been seeing on my local drives. I hoped this would improve on the motorway over a longer cruising period. The dash reads just over 400 miles to a tank when I brim it, so by my calculations it might be possible, but only just…

The M6 motorway – and the M6 Toll to get us around Birmingham – dominated the day, its rough surfaces, poor driving standards, average speed checks and roadworks combining with grey, drizzle-soaked weather to make life as miserable as you could imagine.

However, the car did its level best to brighten up our day. It really is amazingly comfortable, both in terms of its front seats and its suspension.

We made brilliant headway throughout the morning, stopping at Lancaster Services simply for a drink; we could easily have done the whole lot in one go, but we were tracking to be more than an hour early to the party! A coffee and a stretch of the legs seemed the best solution.

We eventually rolled into Windermere and began navigating its tiny streets around 12:30, and I was instantly glad the Aircross is so wieldy. I’ve said this before, but considering how chunky it looks, it really does handle just like a softly sprung hatchback. The steering is very light, which makes tighter corners easier.

Having made it in plenty of time for the party, we settled down and enjoyed the festivities, including a remarkable buffet laid on by my brother-in-law.

We decided to leave for leg two late afternoon, just as the light was starting to peter out. It was only when we reached the M6 again that the rain began, and in the gloom it seemed like everyone had forgotten basic rules of the road. There was tailgating, undertaking, aggression and negligence at every juncture, and I could tell this would be a tiring drive. I did what I always do in this situation: slowed right down, left loads of room around me, and settled in for the long haul.

The return leg…

So far the C5 Aircross had sipped around half its fuel, the trip computer stating we’d get home with only a few miles to spare. Game on…

We stopped at Lancaster again simply to break the journey up, grabbing some tea for later at the unforgivably expensive shop – a decision we regretted as soon as the attendant rang up our items on the till. Not to worry, though. Lesson learnt.

Thankfully the traffic thinned out a bit at this point, and we made easy progress down the remainder of the M6 towards home. We arrived at the A14 and two things happened – the car bonged telling me I was low on fuel, with around 50 miles left in the tank according to the gauge.

And secondly, I noticed just how effective the automatic main beam headlights are on the Aircross. They’re not as advanced as the ‘Matrix’ items found in some other cars, but they do the job well, activating when there’s nobody around and dipping when they detect another road user.

But going back to the bonging quickly, I was really impressed with what Android Auto does in this situation. It automatically switches to a view of all the nearest service stations, giving you distances and also telling you the price of fuel at each, which allows you to make decisions based on price as well as proximity. Clever stuff.

I decided to stop a few miles from home, simply because I wanted to use the car again the following day without having to visit a filling station. It could have done the whole day’s driving, just, but life got in the way…

The car registered fuel economy of 42.1mpg over the trip, which being honest, isn’t actually as high as I was expecting. I suppose a vehicle of these dimensions is asking rather a lot from a 1.2-litre engine.

Still, what a great companion for a journey like this. I got out at the end never wanting to see the M6 again, but fully ready to jump back in the Citroen.

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Update 4: An engine essay

The elephant in the room is up for discussion. It’s the C5 Aircross’s 1.2 engine…

In this update, having covered more than 5,000 miles in the Citroen C5 Aircross, I’d like to talk about something I immediately suspected would be the elephant in the room when I first saw the spec sheet: its engine.

You see, while it might look like a large SUV, this Aircross only boasts a 1.2-litre petrol engine, and it’s not many years since such paltry capacity in a vehicle this big would have been laughed out of the car park.

It’s fair to say it hardly dominates proceedings. The French firm’s PureTech engines are very highly regarded as smooth and relatively powerful, but even with your foot firmly down on the accelerator there isn’t what you’d call a lot of punch.

Smooth PureTech’s paltry petrol performance

Its 10.5-second 0-62mph time illustrates this point well, resolutely not setting the world on fire, although thanks to the extra torque from the turbocharger it does overtake fairly competently. You just need to drop at least one gear in order to do so.

The size vs performance deficit also rears its head when it comes to fuel economy, with 40mpg an optimistic dream unless you’re going so slowly that you’ll be holding up traffic. The claimed fuel economy of 41.3-49.5mpg seems rather generous to me, having tested it in all driving conditions imaginable over the past few months.

Many cars fare better on the motorway than on rural country lanes, but even on my M6 adventure recently, trying extra hard, I only managed 42mpg. When petrol is so expensive, those extra miles-per-gallon would come in very useful indeed, but they remain elusive. A hybrid or a diesel would fare far better, I suspect.

However, all of that isn’t to say it’s a bad car to drive. Quite the opposite, in fact: there’s a pleasing pep to the performance that makes this engine endearing, accompanied by a characteristic three-cylinder thrum.

The gearchange is great too – it’s a solid-feeling, long-throw manual, which is characteristic of French cars of yore – but I can’t help wishing it were an automatic.

Not only would it be easier to drive (albeit less characterful), but the clutch pedal doesn’t have a lot of room and I find my boots rub against the footrest on the left-hand side of the footwell when I use it. This isn’t the end of the world, and it hasn’t yet marked my shoes, but I’d like a bit more space down there…

Anyway, one thing I have noticed recently is that the engine has improved noticeably. A few thousand miles have really helped it loosen up, and it feels freer to rev and smoother too. This is a good no-cost upgrade and goes to show that sometimes cars get better with age.

The same can’t be said of the windscreen washers I was raving about in my earlier updates, though. I’ve recently discovered that when you run out of fluid, there’s no warning light to let you know, so either keep it topped up regularly, carry some fluid around with you, or prepare to get caught unable to rinse the screen.

Of course, this will inevitably only happen when said screen is filthy, the sun is low in the sky, and you’re on a motorway with no services for miles. And yes, that’s experience talking. Or do I mean complaining?

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Update 5: Practical in places

The C5 Aircross looks like a large SUV, but how does that affect its usefulness as family transport? Gareth’s been finding out…

I’ve mentioned several times now that the C5 Aircross seems like it doesn’t have enough engine for the size of the car, but I’m pleased to report its practicality more than measures up.

First and foremost, it’ll carry four adults in complete comfort. I’ve done this loads of times, and my passengers have never been anything other than complimentary of the headroom and leg space on offer, and it’s very quiet in the cabin, making longer journeys less of a bother.

Incidentally they like the seats too, in what Citroen rather poetically term an Urban Black interior ambience with black Alcantara and leather-effect cloth, Next-Generation Advanced Comfort Seats, features manual driver lumbar adjustment and electric driver’s seat adjustment (six-way). Phew.

Thanks to tinted glass, it’s a little dark in the back, which some children may not like so much, but there’s loads of space and a USB in the central console to plug some of those all-important smart devices in.

You’re able to trade rear seat legroom with boot space too, because the three seats slide a few inches.

The boot itself has a false floor that enables multiple configurations, although I’m a little disappointed there are no bag hooks back there to hang your shopping on. That feels like an oversight for a family vehicle, and I’ve defaulted to using the rear footwells instead of having bags (and my shopping) rolling around in the cavernous 580-litre boot.

Another bugbear for me is the lack of spare wheel, but I do appreciate they add weight and thus hinder fuel economy.

That didn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice at all when the deflation alarm triggered again the other day, although it turned out one of the tyres had simply lost a few PSI this time rather than going totally flat due to a puncture. I topped it up, reset the warning and haven’t heard a peep since.

Anyway, in many other respects this is a seriously practical car. There’s even a 12-volt socket (the artist formerly known as ‘a cigarette lighter’) in the boot to plug your tyre pump in, which is handy… back in December it passed the patented Christmas Tree Test with flying colours, too.

The big bins in the doors are very useful, and helpfully hold drinks bottles that are too tall to put in the cup holders. Anything too large in them obstructs the gear lever, but a standard 330ml can of your favourite soft drink is fine.

Still, overall, the C5 Aircross is a practical family car. You’ll get cleverer touches in the likes of Skoda’s Kodiaq, but the Citroen is versatile, roomy, quiet, comfortable and solidly built.

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Update 6: Saying goodbye to the good and the bad

The C5 Aircross has some impressive features and some less so…

It’s time to say goodbye to the Citroen C5 Aircross – a medium-sized family SUV that I’ve become rather fond of.

The highlight is undoubtedly its comfort. The suspension has been optimised with that in mind, so the ride is compliant and predictable. But the cabin is also seriously well insulated, and the front seats are just wonderful, with great support and soft materials. They’re among the best car seats I’ve ever tried, in more than a decade of road testing.

High praise in that respect, then, but sadly the same can’t be said for the engine and transmission, which don’t seem particularly well matched to this package. In isolation, the 1.2-litre PureTech is a brilliant motor, with smooth and punchy power delivery, but it’s out of its depth in the Aircross and as such isn’t particularly efficient. Struggling to hit 38mpg isn’t ideal when fuel pricing is so expensive.

In my opinion, it’d benefit from a larger-capacity engine and an automatic gearbox. This combination would blend better with the laid-back nature of the car and make the best of the excellent ride comfort.

It’s a practical car too, with a decently sized boot and room for four adults in the cabin. I ended up carrying most of my shopping in the cabin, however, because of a lack of ways to keep bags secure in the luggage compartment. Some small upgrades in that respect would make a huge difference to the car’s usefulness, although it did still pass the patented Christmas Tree Test with ease, as you can see in the update above.

One small factor that I found a little annoying was the multimedia system’s tendency to default to radio every time I switched the car on, rather than immediately reconnecting to Android Auto. You need to select the latter on the touchscreen every time, which ultimately delays your departure and forces a radio station’s invariably noisy output into your ears for a short time. While this isn’t the end of the world in any respect, other car companies do manage to get the car to default to a streaming system rather than radio. It seems an odd thing to have to put up with.

However, the low-fuel feature that displays the closes filling stations and the price of petrol was a very nice touch:

Another minor electronic bugbear was the sensors for the tyre-pressure monitoring system, which didn’t function when they should have, and also provided me with one ‘false positive’, showing underinflation when it was only a few PSI down.

On the other hand, there’s nothing to warn you when you’ve run out of washer fluid, which means the only way you’ll find out is by running out. Not ideal when you’re on a dirty, drizzly motorway…

And those doors really do collect the muck, which invariably ends up on my trousers, which is slightly irritating.

Another thing I liked was the driver assistance technology on the car, which I found impressively non-intrusive. Such systems – active lane-keeping, adaptive cruise control and automatic braking – can be very annoying in some rival cars but Citroen’s version seems to perform with very little fuss or fanfare, which is just what you want if you ask me.

Overall, the C5 Aircross has been a capable, comfortable companion with a couple of niggles tarnishing an otherwise impressive list of attributes.

Citroen C5 Aircross long-term test: scores on the doors

Model tested: Shine 130hp

Current mileage	7,002
Real-world average fuel economy	38.2mpg
Official combined fuel economy (WLTP figures)	41.3 – 49.5 mpg
Parkers ‘MPP’ (Miles Per Pound) calculation	6.1 – 7.3 mpp
Car joined Parkers fleet	December 2022