‘I wish I’d flown instead’: roadtripping in an old Citroen

‘Why on earth did I do this?’ The thought nudged its way into my head, unwanted and unhelpful, as I stood staring at the metallic beige Citroën Xsara Picasso skulking in the corner of the hotel car park. 

It was raining – pouring, in fact – and hope was fading fast that I’d be able to get home anytime soon. My mood was as bleak as the weather.

The plan had been simple. I had a Citroën launch event to attend in France, where I would be driving the revamped ë-C4. Coincidentally, I then discovered I’d be in possession – temporarily – of a Citroën with no fewer than 513,000 miles on the clock. 

It might be a fun idea, I had concluded in a fit of optimism, to take the old Citroën over to France in order to drive the new one! And, along the way, to find out whether a car with this sort of extreme mileage was still usable on a road trip like this. 

At this moment, though… In this sodden car park, with this beige, heavily used people carrier, I really wish I’d just taken the option of a flight over. Or at least driven something more sensible. 

Predictably, some might say, the plan had gone awry. However, somewhat less predictably, it wasn’t the car that was to blame. Instead, the fault lay with… ahem… yours truly. 

Pass the Picasso

It had all started so well. On a sweltering day in mid-September, I’d trundled down to Dover with the windows agape (the air conditioning, surprise surprise, was defunct), and waited in line for the ferry, pondering my transport.

The Xsara Picasso in question was famous. Well, in certain circles, anyway; it had been owned by one gentleman for most of its life before being traded in at Palmdale Motors, a vehicle-sourcing specialist owned by Ashley Winston. 

At the time, the car had 480,000 miles on the clock, and Ashley, a dyed-in-the-wool enthusiast of cars of every shape and size, was charmed by the fact it had lasted so long. 

As it turned out, the previous owner had used the car to travel back and forth between the UK and his second home in France; he’d seen no reason to change it and, having maintained it religiously and attended to any faults as and when they cropped up, the car had kept on going. 

Ashley decided it would be churlish not to keep the car alive, to see whether it could make the magic 500,000-mile mark. And so he turned to X (formerly Twitter), offering the car up to anyone who might want to borrow it, free of charge, as long as they promised to put miles on the clock and pass it on when they had finished with it. 

The hashtag ‘#PassThePicasso’ was born – and the car has been moving from person to person ever since, ending up in my hands just in time for the trip. 

Fresh off the boat

France, as it turned out, was even hotter than the UK, and I sat gently perspiring as I waited to disembark the ferry, which had been delayed by an unexplained loiterer outside the port of Calais. 

Part of me, I must admit, longed to be doing this trip in something a little more special than a mid-range diesel MPV from the early 2000s. Particularly one with quite a few squeaks and rattles – and a big question mark over its reliability.

Because, let’s face it: the Xsara Picasso is not a car renowned for its longevity. This was a car from Citroën’s pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap era; a basic 1.6i LX would set you back just £12,780, and that was before the usual dealer discounts, which could knock that price down even further. Even a top-of-the-range 2.0 HDi SX, like the one we’ve got here, would set you back no more than £14,450. 

These, in other words, were cars built down to a price, and somewhat disposable as a result; designed to do the job of carting around a family for a very reasonable price – not to outlive the cockroaches. 

Yet somehow, and in spite of having completed the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back – and a bit more – this one’s still here. The reason? Its previous owner’s meticulous upkeep, which rather proves a long-standing theory of mine, which is that any car can be made to last if you’re unstinting about oil changes, and keep up with repairs along the way. 

High-mileage cars that have been treated like this throughout their life are therefore nothing to fear, and we might be shooting ourselves in the foot by chopping and changing, rather than investing in our cars’ upkeep and holding onto them.

This trip was about putting my money where my mouth is. If that was really the case, I reasoned, I should have no hang-ups about driving this car pretty much anywhere. Though for now, with this heat, northern France would do.

Some like it hot

However, trouble looked like it might lay ahead, as Google Maps picked out a section of my route in red. Traffic jams are always a pain, but in a car with this many miles, a long period spent idling on baking French blacktop was not something I relished.  

To be on the safe side, I ducked off the motorway early, and as the A16 veered south-east away from the coast around Abbeville, I instead cut the corner, threading the Picasso along D-roads, through the small town of Saint-Riquier and northern Picardy’s gently rolling landscape, picked out in splendid relief by the golden glow of the now-setting sun. 

The perfect place for an old Citroën – perhaps a charming old Ami 6, with yellow headlamps and an air-cooled motor rattling away beneath the bonnet. Oh well, I thought, as I looked down at the green glow of the Picasso’s digital dashboard. 

It might not have had the charm of an Ami, but I had begun to admit to myself that I wasn’t enduring my steed quite so much as enjoying it. 

For one thing, the driver’s seat in a Picasso is a literal armchair, with a fold-down armrest that’s perfectly positioned to prop up your elbow as the miles slide by. Your perch is mounted high up, too, providing an imperious view out. 

And from inside, you begin to understand why the Picasso looks so odd from without: the acres of glass framed by such slender pillars mean all-round visibility is brilliant, and make the interior gloriously airy. 

Seating plans

In the back, meanwhile, the three individual seats slide, fold and tumble, to allow you to turn the back end into something approximating a small van. You even get a collapsible shopping basket, which folds out and can be wheeled around the supermarket, and secured straight into the boot, then packed away again when not in use. 

There are fold-out tables in the backs of the front seats, where I balanced a coffee and a pastry at one rest stop, which felt most civilised. And if that is not enough, the middle seat even has a flat plastic back complete with two cup holders, so that it can be folded down to act as a table. 

But just how does a Citroën Xsara Picasso with 513,000 miles drive? Well, not as badly as you might expect, actually. 

There are telltale signs that this car is no spring chicken, of course. The slightly lumpy seat, the faded pattern on the upholstery. The way the manual gearbox has no real gate left, so selecting a gear is a case of nudging it vaguely in the right direction, and hoping for the right ratio in return. 

The engine is rather more noisy than it likely was when the car was new, too. But with those exceptions, you’d be hard-pressed to tell. Everything – with the exception of that air conditioning – still works. The dashboard lights up correctly, the blower motor functions on all four speeds, the electric windows rise and fall with surprising grace. 

It is still ever-so-smooth, too. Citroën didn’t compromise on the Picasso’s aims: comfort was all, and to hell with any pretence of dynamism. So yes, it slops about a bit and the engine is sluggish, but even with some doubtless rather worn-out suspension components, barely any modern car can hold a candle to the way the Picasso smothers bumps.

Mission accomplished (partly)

Perhaps it wasn’t that much of a surprise, then, that I still felt relatively fresh as I pulled up at the hotel. Despite the suppurating heat, the Picasso has passed the first part of its challenge with flying colours – no weird noises, no lights on the dashboard, and certainly no failures to proceed. Yes, I was in dire need of a cool shower and a cold beer, but otherwise the journey down had been entirely free of incident.

It was the next day that things went wrong. After breakfast I checked out and went to put my bags in the car, in preparation for my departure later that day. But the Picasso’s key wasn’t with my wallet and phone, where I’d left it. 

With mounting desperation, I searched my room. I asked at reception to see whether it had been handed in. I frantically disgorged the contents of my bag onto the floor, bit by bit, in the hope it had fallen in there instead. All to no avail. 

Disconsolate, I headed off to do the job I was there for. The search would have to resume later. And as I drove away in the ë-C4, past the Picasso parked forlornly under the trees, my mind filled with images of locksmiths smashing the window to gain access, recovery trucks carting the car off to the nearest Citroën dealer, and handling over large sums of money to source a new key that would take days to arrive. 

My relief was palpable, then, upon my return, when I thought to phone Ashley to ask if there was a spare key. As it turned out, there was – and Ashley was willing to courier it to me to arrive the next day. As he set about doing so, I postponed my ferry booking to suit.

Lucky stars

But my good fortune wasn’t to end there. When I returned to the hotel reception to check back in, the receptionist had news. Lo and behold, the original key had been found by a cleaner, having emerged from the hotel room, where it had fallen down and lodged itself between the cabinet and the wall. 

I was lucky it turned up. The next morning, I discovered the spare key had been held up at customs as the courier had lost the relevant paperwork. I left instructions with the hotel to forward it on when it eventually turned up, sent the paperwork again, and headed for home. 

Naturally, the Picasso started first time. And just like that, we were on our way, as though nothing had happened, smearing our way back up the autoroute, only the occasional squeak from a loose bit of interior trim betraying the car’s vast mileage. 

By the time I reached Calais, the Picasso had well and truly wormed its way into my affections. Not only was it, against expectations, a very good long-distance cruiser – but it had crushed the journey like a car with half the mileage, less even. 

Just a few minutes before I arrived, I had watched as the odometer ticked over to 514,000 – another milestone passed by this unexpectedly brilliant car. And at the ferry port, I drank a toast of Orangina to it, and updated the “513,000 miles” legend on the bonnet, with the marker pen that had been stored in the glovebox for the purpose. 

High-mile hero

And that, really, was the most eventful part of the journey home. Sorry to disappoint. The Picasso did everything I asked of it. The only jeopardy in this story came from yours truly. You might say I let the Picasso down, rather than the other way round. Even on this reasonably long road trip, in the middle of a heatwave, this high-mile hero performed faultlessly. 

In so doing, it proved the theory that high-mileage cars are not necessarily to be feared. With attentive maintenance, any car – even one that was arguably built relatively cheaply – will go on and on. Look after your car, and it’ll look after you. 

We can be somewhat throwaway about the way we consume cars these days. But this humble Xsara Picasso shows it doesn’t have to be like that. 

There will, of course, always be those for whom a new car every couple of years is a must-have. But if that feels wasteful or environmentally crass to you, there is another way. Of that, this slightly whiffy old Citroën is living proof.