Formby is a town of some distinction and is associated with a number of famous names, including Stephen Gerrard, Alan Shearer, John Parrot and Dan Dare. Indeed, it was to this seaside town in Lancashire that the Eagle comic hero would return in his spacecraft Anastasia after skirmishes on Venus. Formby was never mentioned by name, but the illustrator, Frank Hampson, is known to have got the idea for the Spacefleet HQ after visiting a landfill site near the town.
Despite his fertile imagination, Hampson never quite got to grips with cars of the future, and even though Dan Dare was set at the turn of the 20th Century, the cars still looked like rather elaborate Ford Prefects. Had he modelled them on the C4 Picasso, no doubt they would have been considered too far-fetched.
Yet the Citroen does have a Dan Dareish air to it. From the cabin it seems made almost entirely of glass, the dashboard owes more to space flight than to negotiating terra firma, and the electronic transmission consigns conventional gearboxes to the age of Brunel. Moreover it is roomy, flexible, extremely comfortable, and the engine might work on microwaves, for all the noise it makes. In short, the future is here, now.
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the seven-seater costs only £700 more than its 5-seater equivalent |
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Admittedly, I drove the range-topping Exclusive model, which has all the Anastasia gadgets, but even the base model demonstrates Citroen's unique ability to be several steps ahead: the spirit of the Traction Avant and the DS lives on.
Not to be confused with the Xsara Picasso, which is still available, the C4 Picasso is a larger and more advanced rendition of the midi-MPV theme and comes in two sizes - a five-seat regular model and a Grand, which has seven seats. Four engine options are available, two petrol and two diesel. On this occasion, the test car was a five-seater model, powered by the 1.6 HDi diesel engine driving through the EGS electronic gearbox, and bundled with sufficient extras to push the standard list price of £20,195 up to a whopping £27,045, which will buy you a range-topping C8 with plenty of cash to spare. More to the point, model-for-model, the seven-seater Grand costs only £700 more than its 5-seater equivalent, right across the range.
One modern definition of inspiration is 'a sudden brilliant idea'. In that context, the 110-horsepower HDi engine is the least inspired aspect of the car. Tried and tested is the phrase that comes to mind, yet with the assistance of the EGS transmission - more of which later - the old workhorse sounds and feels as if it were invented at breakfast this morning, although it won't trouble you with g forces.
Developing a peak torque of just 240 Nm, it probably has less torque than a Black & Decker drill, which would explain a leisurely 0-62 time, even with overboost, of 13.4 seconds. Admittedly that's in conjunction with the EGS transmission, but even the stick-box version is not a lot quicker. But the torque peaks at a lowly 1750 rpm, and since the paddle-change transmission is so finger-flicking simple, there is no excuse for driving outside the peak-torque envelope, where responses are at their best. And because the engine comes good at low revs, it sounds, if you can hear it at all, unflustered and never obtrusive.
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