Tuesday 15 December 2020

Alas poor C5, I knew it well

We've just given up our last C5, so here is a post-of-record to mourn its passing and replacement by a Passat. In summary it was a good car, but fragile.

We had four C5's over the years. The first, cloud-grey, was our first decent car and our only from-new car. It replaced a second-hand red Citroen BX that I gave away to someone at work. Here we see that BX having its rear window repaired; here's another view.

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Miriam bought the C5 in the flush of the dotcom boom, or thereabouts. It was a marvel: it had air conditioning - indeed, it had climate control, a  distinction we didn't know about until later - and all sorts of other nice stuff (oh yes: the glass in the tailgate could be lifted separately, wonderfully useful for loading for holidays). It cost about £13k, partly cheap because discounted as the first of its class and Citroen were promoting it. AF51 UXO. At least briefly, we even cared about it: Miriam bought it a fire extinguisher, to be good, and we put a blanket on the back seat to preserve the seat from the children.

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Alas it got pranged - see pic - by someone changing lanes badly while E and I were coming back from picking up kitchen parts from Ikea in Milton Keynes. Here it is in happier times - this will be one of the times I took D, E, N and P to the Norfolk coast around Old Hunstanton.

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That prang, and the results, was a nasty shock: although the car didn't seem, superficially, badly damaged it was a write-off (as far as the insurance were concerned) because (a) the front crumple zone, whilst really good at crumpling, is rather hard to un-crumple; and (b) the air bags had gone off, and are expensive to replace. So, we took their cash and bought a private second-hand C5 in deep blue, RX04 MKD. It was in decent condition and spec, and cost £8k cash. That's what went to Kerouini in 2007, and it must have lasted a while, because here it is in 2012:

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That's with Joy-the-scull at Boston on the top on my cunning James-aluminium-ladder-roofrack, because i was too cheap to buy a real one. and anyway, the ladder was better, because longer; and a couple of wooden beams made a decent rack. Regrettably (I think I'm recalling this right) I managed to trash that one by driving into some idiot who stopped abruptly at the entrance to a roundabout. Again, the glass nose came into play.

So we replaced it - in something of a hurry - with a rather cheap (£2k) not very high spec silver C5, whose sole virtue was that it had a towing hook. Which was rather useful as we were going to lots of regattas around then.

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This didn't have the lifting rear glass. Nor did it have alloy wheels, oh the shame. It didn't even have electric rear windows. And it didn't have climate control, it had crummy air conditioning. Meh, it worked. For a reasonable length of time. But then, something went wrong - and I forget exactly what - something to do with the ABS system (possibly, now I think of it, prophetically, the ESP bit) - and fixing that would have bene more than it was worth. So... we got a decent (and decent spec: our first SavNav, and Bluetooth. Funkily, the wing mirrors folded when it was locked, which was great for telling form a distance that it was locked) blue C5 (new model) for about £9k; YN13 NHH. This, being the new model, didn't have the pneumatic suspension. Here it is, in 2018, at an alpine pass, on the way back home (see here for the Dolomites segment).

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And this too was a good car... until it stopped being good, and the ABS / ESP started playing up. And despite the best efforts of the garage, they couldn't fix it, and we lost patience - after a long time, mind you - and with regret (because it was 99% perfectly functional, and the non-functional bit really wasn't important, but was able to prevent it starting if it got uppity, gave it up as scrap. See-also Wales: Caernarfon, and the hills beyond.

In all of our C5's the engines have worked flawlessly and they've driven fine and all of that.

So, here's the Passat MJ67 DDF. Second-hand, 43k on the clock, £13k, from Cazoo. Vignette: Rob, spotting the Cazoo sticker in the back: "you mean you actually bought this from Cazoo? I couldn't imagine the sort of person who would do that". Because he is a car-owning sort of person that would like to feel his car before buying it. To be fair, we'd driven Mfd+J's Skoda estate, which is similar.

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Its OK. It has 6 gears, but is - to my current tastes - somewhat weirdly geared. I can stall it in first and second without much trouble. It has "keyless" which I haven't got used to yet. The roof bars are odd. It has crummy AC not climate control. Miranda, when she first saw it, asked it is was from-new, because it was so clean, and she hadn't realised anything but a new car could be that clean. It still fits a bike in the back. It has no handbrake, instead it has autolock, which is probably good, but feels weird.

Refs

Fixing my Citroen C5 tourer rear washer water

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