Goodwood Test: Citroën C5X 2022 Review

The middle of Citroën’s range – the things that aren’t funky crossovers or small city cars – has been in the wilderness for many a year now. What even is the C4 anymore? Does the comfortable French saloon exist? Well, the C5X appears to be trying to wage a war for that lost ground, to stage a fightback for the estate in a world of bigger machines.

The selling point here will be a mixture of style and comfort, as well as a small sprinkling of technology. Can Citroën find its place back in the middle of the market, or is it actually more drastic than that? Can Citroën bring the middle market back? The Mondeo is dead, the Insignia barely seen, the newbies from Korea seem to have no interest in saloons and estates, so it’s up to the French vanguard to keep it alive.

The C5X goes aggressive from the very first look. It’s a striking machine from almost every angle, taking the traditional estate and making it all angular. Since it’s an estate let’s start at the rear, it has the trad estate hatch, but the roofline slopes aggressively to meet a pointed end, no slab back here. That, of course, impinges slightly on boot space, but in return you get a car that looks sharp from the back as well as the front.

The C5X appears to be trying to blend the estate aesthetic with some SUV stylings to reach out to the rest of the world – with slightly higher arches and plastic surrounds making it seem more like a crossover.

The front is excellent, an absolute riot of elements somehow coming together to work. It has super slim upper lights – reminiscent of the never-going-to-be-legal ones on the original Tesla Cybertruck model – which slide into the faux upper grille. Below there are the larger units, cut into where you might expect to find intakes for brake cooling. At their size they should look massive but with the upper lights they create an “X” motif along the bonnet through that upper grille. Describing a car in this many elements could easily mean it’s a mess, but the C5X manages to work. Somehow balancing all the competing dreams – SUV, estate, hatch – into one competent, striking, package.

This particular Citroën C5X has a plug-in hybrid powertrain. A 1.5-litre four-cylinder turbocharged petrol mated to a front mounted electric motor for a combined 225PS (165kW). You can also get it with a 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol and a 1.6.

With 250Nm (184lb ft) when both engine and motors are working the hybrid C5X will hit 62mph in a not-sluggish 7.9 seconds and head on to 145mph. The engine is OK, but really does rather need its electric accompaniment to keep everything ticking over properly, so do remember to charge it when you can. The batteries – 12.4kWh worth, mounted in the boot – have a range of around 37 miles and charge in roughly 90 minutes on a 7.4kW charger.

But speed in a straight line, or even around a bend, is not what Citroën is known for, or what the C5X is aiming for. The C5X is selling itself on old fashioned French comfort. So how comfortable is it? The answer is very, although there are a couple of qualifiers. The C5X has MacPherson strut front and multi-link rear suspension, but on the hybrid both axles are blessed with Citroën’s Progressive Hydraulic Cushions. These work at the bumpstops to clean up the suspension action, removing all but the extremely harshest of holes in the road. The C5X hybrid form also has adaptive dampers so you can tune the level of waft.

How much you like it may well be personal choice. If you move to comfort mode the suspension can move all the way from “comfort” to just floating around the place. In true Citroën style we drove the C5X around one of Goodwood’s least well-kept fields, and you would barely have known it wasn’t fresh tarmac. But on the road for some that can move from comfortable to just too bouncy quickly. Hybrid mode balances things in a way that I enjoyed, riding the bumps incredibly well, but some at team GRR wanted the “sport” setting since it gathers everything together better.

The performance of that hydraulic system is showcased best over a sharp crest, where the C5X feels like it should hit the limits of its suspension travel with a crash, but instead floats into them, more like a feather hitting the ground than a brick – and this car weighs 1.8 tonnes. To add a little more surprise that extra softness doesn’t kill it in the corners. It’s not exciting or engaging, but at no point does it feel like roll is going to induce terror, just that it’ll treat them like something to get around rather than attack.

The interior is dark – seemingly a theme on French test cars at the moment – but extremely comfortable. The extra light touches of faux wood are an attempt to emulate some higher end machines, and look and feel acceptable. The soft touch plastics on the dash are excellent and the Advanced Comfort Seats are excellent even on long journeys.

Most functions are controlled through a ten-inch central screen, although the climate controls have been thankfully left below using physical buttons. The instrument binnacle is now entirely digital, a small seven-inch unit with no traditional dials. Overall it is a good place to spend time, with all materials feeling of a high quality. It doesn’t quite match the exterior for drama and style, or even feel as mad as a Citroën perhaps should. But if you ignore the double chevron its up there with its rivals.

Perhaps the only part of the C5X that feels a teeny bit under cooked is the tech. And I don’t mean the amount chucked into this hybrid, more the functionality. The C5X comes as standard with Isofix, tyre pressure monitors, keyless entry and go, front and rear parking sensors with a 360-degree camera, the ten- and seven-inch screens, electric heated seats, heated steering wheel, dual zone climate control wireless charging, pre-conditioning, adaptive cruise control and more.

The main touchscreen is simplified almost in the extreme. Which makes it very easy to use in the long run – just swipe left and right and pick the image that looks like what you want – but at first it’s a little less than intuitive to use. For example, if you push the main menu button a second time you’ll be left with basically nothing on screen. But once you do get used to it, it has many good features. The big simple-to-see images make it easy to use quickly and the ability to select driving functions to save as favourites is a boon. We immediately bookmarked how to turn off lane keep assist so we could turn it off in two clicks every time, not about five.

Some other tech is a little woolly too, the radar cruise control’s love of coming on and off throttle does not mesh well with the soft suspension and the tiny little screen in the dash feels like it doesn’t hold quite enough info. But this is a £39,000 car with massage seats, not an £80,000 one. Everything you really need works extremely well.

We do need to try the other powertrains to give you a broader verdict – and experience what the C5X is like without its cushion-like hydraulics – but from this experience it feels like Citroën might be back in its happy place. The C5X looks cracking, it rides like a proper soft French cruiser, the plug-in hybrid system pretty much delivers good economy (probably 60-70mpg in reality, not the 186 that WLTP appears to have fantasised) and the 37-mile range, while shorter than some rivals, is still decent. The balance between engine and hybrid is barely perceptible, to the point that you have to be really hoofing it to actually remember it’s a petrol, and the wind noise is basically non-existent.

With 485 litres of boot space (1,580 if the seats are down) it’s not the biggest in the world, but you’re paying for a reduction in space to have something that looks like that. And, at the end of the day, a small sacrifice to feel so much better than we would in an SUV is no real trouble.