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in Morton, Derbys, described by Wikipedia as the exact centre of England). Thing is, though, I’m not a C4 mum, so that’s exactly (almost) what I said to the long-suffering Mrs Motormouth a couple of months ago.
And that’s exactly what we’ve just done.
To be fair, I wouldn’t be doing this job unless I liked cars, and driving in Europe’s biggest country sure beats the hell out of crawling around in packed out Britain, so off we went, courtesy of some VIP treatment from P&O Ferries, and we made it to Nice with just a one-night stop.
I have to say, taking the ferry instead of the Chunnel made a great difference coming home. The hour’s rest on board gives you the chance to recover from two days of hammering along French autoroutes at a steady 85mph.
Don’t call the cops, that’s the speed indicated by the speedometer, the real speed is a lot lower than that in most cars and the actual speed limit on French autoroutes is 81mph.
So, loaded up, and with what seemed to be no room left in the car, I checked our average fuel consumption after the journey and it was an astonishing 46mpg.
Delight
Citroën’s claimed figure is actually
61mpg but I don’t think that’s calculated at 85mph over 2,000 miles.
Fact is, despite it having just a baby
1.2-litre three cylinder engine it could easily have gone a lot quicker but the French police don’t, as they say, mess about. Or something like that. Its heart lies under the bonnet.
The second thing to delight me about the C4 was that, when we got to Calais, Mrs Motormouth completely emptied the boot of its four suitcases onto the back seats to leave room for a shopping trip to Calais Vins.
Was the weight of six cases of wine enough to affect its performance? Not that I noticed.
The only problem I had with the C4 was that its indicator noise warning was so quiet you ended up driving along the autoroute overtaking lane with your indicator flashing away until it turned into a loud “switch me off” level.
Mind you, as the French overtake with their indicators permanently switched on, that wasn’t much of a problem anyway.