LONG TERM REPORT

36,000 miles

By Chris Goffey

IMPRESSIVE BUT EXPENSIVE

Another visit to Slough produced an electrician who enlarged the hole in the plastic shroud round the instrument panel through which the stalks protruded. He did this with a hand file and he touched up the raw plastic edges with a dab of black paint. No materials charge; £3.09 labour!

Then at 32,000 miles a colleague took the car to Silverstone, and on his way back down the motorway, noticed an ominous cloud of smoke behind him.

He stopped under a motorway bridge, and waited an hour for an AA man to appear. They found that a bolt had dropped out of the back of the left-hand cylinder head, and the engine oil had been pumped out all over the engine compartment. When the engine was re-filled with oil and started, an ominous knocking started. Citroën diagnosed run camshaft bearings, accepted responsibility as they had so recently worked on the engine, and changed the bearings at no charge.

The only point to jar has always been the gear change, notchy and noisy, and completely out of character with the rest of the car. The clunk and bang if the change from first to second is rushed is most intrusive. The rest of the changes are similarly harsh and one wonders why the factory have not done more to solve this problem.

Towards the end of its time with me the Citroën showed only a few signs of its increasing mileage -the heated rear screen started to perform rather less efficiently than it had done, and the hot and cold blower motors seemed to have lost a few revs.

At 36,000 miles the cloth seats were stained, while it was possible to vacuum-off dog hairs and mud, the yellow cloth was looking dingy, and upholstery shampoo made but a small improvement. The driver`s seat had sagged towards the rear of the cushion, and if one jumped into the car quickly and sat down hard one made painful contact with a rail at the back of the seat. The coarse carpets however, wore extremely well and were still cleaning up well when we parted company. The long-term car was fitted with fixed seat-belts, and while the little plastics clamps were in place at the top of the belt near the pillar, they hooked away quite tidily.

I found the child safety seat was easy and convenient to fit.

By slackening two bolts inside the boot, the squab of the rear seat can be eased forward and the anchorage belts of the safety seat inserted into the boot between the seat back and the rear parcel shelf. Inside the boot it was easy to anchor the belts to the steel cross members behind the back seat with a minimum of drilling. The lower belts were more difficult since the back seat is all one cushion, there is no break between seat back and seat. There are however, two slits in the material in the centre of the back seat – presumably for fitting rear lap straps – and with a great deal of difficulty we managed to anchor one strap there.

During my ownership the car suffered no body damage save a slight dent on a front wing caused by an unidentified careless parker. The leading edge of the wing does in fact protrude almost beyond the bumper and it is easy to misjudge this when manoeuvring the car in tight places. The front wings can be unbolted a la DS for easy repair and replacement, but the rear wings cannot. I was intrigued to find, when I visited the Rennes factory where the GS is made, that the rear wing is in fact bolted on in production, but that a team of men then laboriously fill with solder and hand-flat the joint between the rear wing and the back screen pillar. Just why, I never did really discover, the engineers spoke about the “strength of the rear section” but the DS does not suffer from any weakness in the rear, and I cannot believe a single lead-filled joint can add much to structural rigidity.

In the current climate with the absurd price of petrol, the interest in this small-engined “luxury” car is even greater.

Comparisons of Road Test figures for the 1,220 c.c. and the 1,015 c.c. cars show the larger engine version to be just the more economical, through its higher gearing and lower-stressed engine. If you have to travel far in a small car, you will be hard pressed to find a competitor, let alone an equal in the class.