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Citroën XM 

A reproduction of the 1991 UK brochure which comprised a reprint of Car Magazine's test of eleven executive cars

STYLING BNGINEERING
VISUALLY, THERE’S SOMETHING FOR all tastes here. Of the two Oininfarina-styled cars, both paragons of elegance, the distinctive Alfa 164 out-ranks the rather bland Peugeot 605 with a bold face that proudly shouts its maker’s identity. The only thing wrong with the Peugeot, which apes the lesser 405 on a grander scale, is that it’s too anonymous. Not so its PSA stablemate, the big Citroen: criticise the fussy multi-pillared superstructure and kicked-up waistline if you vvill, but the Xl\/I eschews convention - and for that we applaud this individualistic car.
The same cannot be said of the German nobility. Take away the trademark grilles of the BMW and Mercedes, and all that they symbolise, and the 525 and 260 shape up as attractive, well-proportioned cars rather than crowd-pulling ones. Both give best aerodynamically to \/auxhall’s
overtly streamlined Senator, its chip-grille snout distancing it unconvincingly from the lesser Carlton. Even so, the Senator carries off its uppercrust pretensions rather better visually than the Saab (which is more attractive as a hatchback) and the multi-layered Rover Sterling (more glamorous than its looks suggest).
The booted Ford Granada lacks the cohesive form of the five-door hatch that spawned it, and the best that can be said of the Volvo 960 ls that it doesn’t look quite as ugly as the 760 it supplants. As Volvo capitalises on tank-like safety, why not Chieftain styling to promote it?
That leaves the svelte Jaguar, the sleekest, most imposing car of the 11, not least because it is the most dated. Instead of a fashionable wedged profile, shunned by Sir William Lyons’ disciples in the name of tradition, the bluff-front, chrome-embellished XJ6 droops at the tail, to the detriment of drag and boot space, but not presence or style.
For smaller cars, the push-or-pull debate is no longer an issue; front-vvheel drive is now universally accepted as the way forward. Here, in the executive sector, where packaging efficiency is not so crucial, the debate still runs, and heatedly so. The front-drive brigade is represented by the Alfa, Citroen, Peugeot, Rover and Saab. Ford, Volvo and Vauxhall have all turned to front-drive povvertrains for their down-range models, but they retain traditional rear-drive layouts at executive level, like the three grande marques they seek to emulate - BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes-Benz.
With one exception, this is a battle between normally aspirated sixes. The BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Vauxhall and Volvo are powered by in-house, straight-six engines - 24-valve twin-cams in all but the sc Mero. Of the V6 quintet, Citroen and Peugeot employ joint-venture 12-valve Douvrin V6s (foresaken by Volvo in the 960 for a new in-liner with Porsche connections), each individually tailored to the maker's needs. Both are out-ranked now by more expensive 24-valve alternatives, although, in the XM, the 24V engine is not mated to an auto box.
Alfa and Ford have their ovvn 12-valve V6s, that of the Scorpio looking pretty antiquated with pushrod valvegear. Under the Rover’s bonnet, there’s a Legend V6 24-valve powertrain, underlining the Sterling’s technical debt to Honda.
Odd car out, and on the face of it least, is the 2.3-litre Saab, two cylinders short of all its rivals and nearly a litre down on the
biggest of them, the 3.2-litre Jaguar. To offset these deficiencies, the Saab’s four-cylinder, 16-valve twin-cam engine has two counter-rotating balance shafts and an exhaust-driven turbocharger.
Five of the 11 cars (Alfa, Citroén, Jaguar, Peugeot and Saab) use ZF’s ubiquitous four-speed autmatic transmission in various guises, the BMW going one better with ZF’s new tive-speeder. The Ford, Mercedes, Rover (Honda) and Vauxhall (GM) use their own four-speed gearboxes, Volvo one sourced from Aisin-Warner in Japan, which also supplies the Lexus LS400.
Assisted steering is obligatory at this level. So are all-disc, anti-lock brakes.
While several cars have very sophisticated coil-sprung suspension (such as the Merc’s multi-link arrangement) only the Citroen displays real chassis innovation, gas/air springs being linked to an electronic system that resists cornering roll without penalising ride resilience.