Top 3 things you need to know about the Citroën C5 Aircross
It takes something special for a newcomer to the mid-size SUV party to grab buyers’ attention, so Citroën brought all of their best traditional tricks (and a few non-traditional ones) to the party with their range-topping mid-sized SUV. Let’s take a closer look at some of Top 3 things you need to know about the Citroën C5 Aircross.
Looking suitably futuristic and featuring a lot of modern technology, the C5 Aircross perpetuates the concept that a Citroën should be advanced, comfortable, and distinctive-looking. Fortunately, it delivers on all these counts, and has a number of unique gadgets and a trick suspension to go with its dramatic styling.
1. It majors on versatility
There are plenty of spacious family SUVs out there, but the C5 Aircross really belongs in a different league altogether on account of its superb versatility. The key features here are the three individual sliding, reclining and folding rear seats, and its large boot.
This design allows for various seating- and luggage area configurations, and gives a boot volume that can vary from 520- to 720-litres, depending on how much room the rear seat occupants desire. Fold them all down, and a sizeable 1 630 litres becomes available. That’s edging into full-size SUV luggage space numbers, and not even those have anything like the Citroën’s lovely two-tone part-leather upholstery at the top-trim “Shine” derivative’s price point.
Related: Our road test of the Citroën C5 Aircross re-ignited our love affair with French cars.
2. There’s a whole lot of clever tech inside
This pertains particularly to the Shine variant – the lower-trim Feel has to make do without some of the nice gadgets, but remains better-equipped than most its mainstream opponents nonetheless. Standard across the board are a colour infotainment system with full smartphone mirroring (but strangely, navigation-free), dual-zone climate control, a configurable digital instrument cluster, cruise control, auto-on headlights and wipers, lane departure warning, and rear parking sensors.
Opting for the pricier Shine will get you more high-tech stuff, like blind spot monitoring, keyless entry with pushbutton start, a wireless charging tray, front parking sensors and a rear-view camera, as well as possibly the coolest, most useful gadget to be fitted to a car in a long time: a built-in dash cam. Equipped with a standard 16 GB memory card, this rear-view mirror-mounted camera take HD still photos and video, makes its recordings shareable via email or social media, and automatically saves video recordings in the event of an accident.
Related: Five extras you should fit on a new Citroën C5 Aircross.
Image credits: Citroën
3. Citroën is doing interesting stuff with suspension systems again...
The company built its early reputation by doing unusual stuff with their cars’ suspension systems, and the C5 Aircross presents a return to this philosophy. This time, it’s not a complicated hydra-pneumatic system with pumps and pipes and spheres, but rather something quite simple but fiendishly clever.
Citroën calls their innovation “Progressive Hydraulic Cushions”, and it consists of unique hydraulic mountings on each end of each shock absorber. This essentially boils down to three-stage shock absorbers, and offers tailored control for both compression and rebound (suspension extension) over a wide operating range, to absorb both small road imperfections and large disturbances with equal aplomb.
