Cabin fever
Report 2 Citroen C3 £16,825/£18,710 as tested
This month I am addressing personally the team who dreamt up the C3’s interior. All of you, take a bow, an ovation, and the rest of the week of. The details inside this little Citroen are what loads of us been crying out for for years. Hang about, you lot from the tech workshop sneaking of towards the exit. You aren’t going anywhere.
Anyone with common sense accepts soft-touch car dashboards are stupid. No one, beyond the interior-fetishising hermits Audi keeps locked in a bunker below Ingolstadt, cares about squidgy dash tops, because you never touch it. What you do want are expensive-feeling materials where you do actually touch the car. The C3 gets this. The top of the dash is shiny, cheap plastic. Rock-hard. Tinny. So what? The door handles and dash trim are real, waxy leather. The seat fabric is pillowy and inviting.
There’s real metal, cool to the fngers, on the gearlever and surrounding all switchgear. The clasps that hold those leather door handles look like they’ve come of a Hogwarts school trunk – except 50 years in the future. The supple steering wheel rim is identical to a Bentley Bentayga’s – the seam faces the driver, so it’s comfy in your hands.
Citroen has realised spending money where humans put their hands is more important than simply copying German tactics. As a result, the C3 has a more intelligently upholstered cabin than a Mini or VW Polo, but feels no less hard-wearing. Encore, design team.
A pity, then, that there aren’t a few more buttons for heaters and satnav. This touchscreen is light years better than a Peugeot 208’s or Renault Clio’s but it’s still too much style = too much time with eyes of the road. Zooming in on a map is a heart-in-mouth gamble. Most of the time, I choose to bake in the glass roof’s greenhouse heat than risk jabbing for the aircon. Minimalism works for materials, but tech-wise, give us bloody hard points!