C5 Aircross vs Africa
Citroën’s new crossover on road and o‚ in Morocco
Aman walks along the road beside his donkey. The donkey is carrying a bush on its back. The leaves will feed some cows. The branches will be burned for cooking. Hailed by a Ford Transit minibus driver, the donkey’s minder disentangles himself from his smartphone. A handshake, a kiss, and while they dawdle over their conversation, the donkey just carries on, following the road like generations of donkeys before and, doubtless, generations yet to come.
This is a salt trading road – salt being one of the oldest and most valuable commodities among Morocco’s many old and valuable natural commodities. The bush, by contrast, is not going to make anyone rich, but it will keep the wolf from the door for another day. Eventually the Transit leaves, the man puts his earbuds back in and plods on after the donkey.
I’m watching this effortless mingling of ancient and modern while messily fighting a losing battle with a prickly pear. It’s not a pear but it is prickly. These things grow on cacti, so you can just pick them – or, like me, you can pull over to a shack at the side of the road in your Citroën C5 Aircross and haggle the vendor up until you’ve paid his rent for the rest of the year.
They’re glorious once you get in – like a pomegranate meeting a kiwi fruit and spawning a fig – but without a knife you’re in trouble. The Citroën’s keyfob is no use: chunky and blunt. I look for a sharp rock, but they’re all well worn by centuries of erosion. I look in the C5’s boot. Our test car has a spare wheel – it’s an option, and a sensible one if you’re going off road, as we will be later – but the only tool is a wheelbrace, which would squash the fruit rather than peel it. I save it for later.
Brushing myself down, so as not to mess up the Citroën’s
It’s another world in here. Outside: hot, dusty, squinty. Inside: grey, fresh, cool, clean
smart but welcoming interior, I settle back into the wonderful Advanced Comfort seat and shut the thick-glassed door. It’s another world in here. Outside: hot, dusty, squinty. Inside: grey, fresh, cool, clean. And did I mention comfortable? They’ve given it a circled R, which surely should signify that Advanced Comfort is a science thing, but actually it’s a marketing thing. But these are indisputably very comfortable chairs, in a very comfortable cabin, remarkably uncluttered and roomy feeling.
It’s good in the back, too, where all three seats are adultsized, and slide and fold independently. The only downside is that the sliding glass roof (an option on some versions, standard on others) eats into the rear headroom. It adds to the light, airy look of the cabin, but if you open it you’ll just burn your bald spot.
Citroën – which is one of the world’s leading exponents of mingling the traditional and the advanced – has been doing remarkable things with interiors for decades, on and off. It comes up with the odd dud; nobody will ever get nostalgic for the Xantia dashboard. But this is one of its best cabins, if also one of the least showy. It’s characterised by its digital-only dash – even the most basic spec includes a 12.3-inch4
instrument screen and a central eight-inch high-definition touchscreen, amid a great wealth of connectivity, wireless charging and electronic safety aids.
Unlike the smaller C3 Aircross, which tends to the zany if not the wacky, the C5 Aircross favours subdued hues and clean, calming shapes, with the Airbump bulges on the side easy to miss. It’s wonderfully unfussy inside, and quite a contrast to the visual overkill of the cabins in closely related family members such as the DS 7 and Peugeot 5008. And there’s none of that plumbed-in perfume nonsense that was until recently meant to be a selling point in Citroëns. Instead you get some heavy-duty air filters that earn their keep on our two-day trip from Marrakech to Ouarzazate and back again.
It’s one of those journeys that could be tedious if you did it regularly, whether by donkey or French crossover, but is brimming with sights, sounds and smells that are a delight for senses numbed by a chilly, breezy British autumn. Most of the roads on our 300-mile round trip are fine – some straight and smooth, some scenic and twisty – but much of the 30-mile stretch between Tizi-n-Tichka and Amerzgane is occupied by roadworks so complex and ambitious that they seem likely to continue forever.
Their mission, as far as we could establish from a multi-lingual shrug-fest with various other queue-dwellers, is to skim some of the rocks from the upper reaches of the hillsides above these narrow, twisty roads, and to erect some concrete supports. It’s a belt-and-braces approach that should make landslides less likely, but should catch some of the falling rocks if that doesn’t work.
Nice idea. But what we can see today is a big digger high4
It might get tedious if you did it regularly – by donkey or French
crossover – but it’s a great escape from the British autumn
up on the hillside that seems to be literally undermining itself, in the manner of Homer Simpson sawing away at the tree branch he’s sitting on. Rocks tumble down on to the road, where a smaller digger scoops them up and lobs them down a slope and out of sight. The big digger is working faster than the smaller digger. We could be here some time. Luckily, the C5 Aircross is – did I mention? – very comfortable, and by now we’ve got the Apple CarPlay working, so we’re no longer in the clutches of the radio and can enjoy some phone tunes.
Eventually the call of the teabreak becomes too strong for the roadwork crew, who clear the rocks from the road just about enough for us to be able to continue our journey across the High Atlas.
We’d been assured that the direct route from the spectacular and frantic Marrakech, north of the High Atlas, to Ouarzazate, a smaller and funkier oasis town on a plateau south
It’s easy to sco at Snow, Sand and Mud modes, until you nd
that Sand mode is exactly what you need to save your blushes
of the High Atlas, would be an unbridled driving delight. That turned out to be true in places, but it’s in reality more of a pleasure from a people-watching, history-absorbing and expensive-fruit-buying point of view. Even where there aren’t roadworks there are holes and bumps and buses and donkey carts and mopeds and pedestrians disinclined to take any attitude from an orange Citroën.
Our C5 Aircross has a 1.6-litre petrol engine and an eightspeed automatic gearbox. A smaller petrol and a couple of diesels are also available. All are front-wheel drive, and all come well equipped. Our test car isn’t a UK-market model, but it’s close to middle Flair spec, plus a few useful extras that take the price to around £30,000.
On this journey, it’s close to ideal. Most of the local cars are taxis, usually small saloons, and there’s a smattering of tourist Land Cruisers. But in the comfort of the C5 Aircross I don’t envy any of them. That’s a lot to do with the climate control, which keeps the cabin air clean and cool as the day outside gets hotter and dustier, and the suspension, which takes the edge off the bumpiness of many of today’s roads. When you get a chance to use the engine, the auto ’box does an excellently seamless job of keeping you in the zone. With 178bhp and 184lb ft, it’s not richly endowed, but it’s well served by the transmission and feels appropriate for this comfort-orientated chassis. The steering is accurate and easygoing rather than quick or sharp. It’s a car that feels like it will look after you, not one that will thrill you. The N9 passes through dozens of small towns, and past roadside cafes and hotels – ‘restaurante, kasbah, riad, piscine, camping, wi-fi’ say the hand-painted signs. Stalls sell everyday essentials for the locals, and tangines, fossils and fruit to passing visitors. In the towns you’re dodging dogs, and out of town you need to be wary of erratically grazing sheep and chickens, and cows being reluctantly unloaded from double-decker transporters. Advanced Active Safety Brake and Active Blind Spot Monitoring – both fitted as standard – make a lot of sense here, where your instincts and experience sometimes need all the digital help they can get. Descending from the hills, we make our approach to Ourzazate as the sun sets. The softer light and long shadows bring out aspects of the car’s design that were hidden by the harsher sun earlier in the day: the long half-pipes on top of the bonnet catch the light nicely, and the shapes made by the LED lights look like they’re in the same tradition as the geometric patterns characteristic of Arabic architecture and furnishing.
A lot of buildings in Morocco are relatively plain on the outside but spectacular inside, with gloriously elaborate4
ceramic inlays and dramatic light from the small, high windows. Our hotel is new, but in keeping with the spirit of traditional local buildings. So there are low, communal tables, ornate tiles, lots of cushions and areas open to the sky. But there’s also, we’re delighted to find, free wi-fi and a good flow of hot water in the showers.
Our return journey the next day takes a major deviation via Telouet, which gives us some spectacular views – initally up from the plains to the mountains, and then from the mountains down on to the plains and gorges. It also gives us about 10 miles of off-roading – most of it pretty gentle, but some of it involving steep climbs on loose surfaces and sharp, unsighted turns.
This is where the optional Grip Control and Hill Descent Control make sense. It’s easy to scoff at Snow mode and Sand mode and Mud mode, but then you find that Sand mode is exactly what you need to save your blushes and let you continue to make smooth, predictable progress.
It’s tempting to keep stopping to take in the scenery and chat with locals. You can see why so much Hollywood filming has been done in the Ourzazate area – partly because it can easily double for the Holy Land in Gladiator, or Slaver’s Bay in Game of Thrones, but also because there’s an easygoing friendliness and keenness to help that you might not associate with Morocco if you don’t get beyond the hassle-fest that is Tangier.
The landscape can seem very alien, but over the centuries humans and animals have come to an understanding with nature. Rather than try to engineer an end to landslides, just set off a little earlier and be prepared to wait a bit. Don’t moan about the heat – erect a shelter and chill out there in the middle of the day.
If you rush it’s all a blur; better to slow down and take in the details. The laundry being done in the river. The family holding hands as they ride their bicycles in latitudinal convoy. The Berber craftsmen, wearing long djellabas and selling jewellery.
And the rock houses. Not actually put here as a metaphor for the C5 Aircross, but they do the job very nicely. Some are carved into the rock-face, others are made by piling stones up and putting a roof on top. It’s been done like this forever. And if you look closer you’ll spot the odd satellite dish, or microwave oven. The traditional ways will get you so far, but sometimes you get a better result by cherrypicking the best of modern technology and merging it seamlessly to create something new and harmonious.
Now, has my prickly pear peeler arrived from Amazon?