Citroen C3 Aircross (2024 - ) review

Aside from the electric one there are two engine options with a C3 Aircross: a basic 1.2 petrol with a manual gearbox and an automatic-only hybrid version that can do a bit of electric driving at low speed; Citroen doesn’t quote an electric-only range for the hybrid, which is telling, but they do say that it “allows 100 per cent of electric driving for almost 50 per cent of urban use”. We can’t verify those percentages, but we did find that the hybrid is good for a real-life 50mpg, which isn’t bad for a spacious SUV with a petrol engine and an automatic gearbox. Knock 10mpg off that figure with the basic petrol model, although you can get into that version for around £20,000. It’s a heck of a lot of car for that money.

Citroens have a reputation for being mechanically and electrically patchy and it's difficult to argue with that. In 2023, the outgoing C3 Aircross came 22nd in a What Car? owner survey about small SUV reliability. Out of 22. Ouch. Citroen tends to place mid-table overall for reliability as a manufacturer in this type of survey, too. That said, we expect this C3 Aircross to be okay, mainly because Citroen is now part of the Stellantis conglomerate of brands – more than a dozen of them, including Vauxhall, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, DS and Jeep. This Aircross is built using parts shared across all these brands, with an enormous amount of development resource poured into the mechanicals and software. It will almost certainly be an improvement over the outgoing C3 Aircross.

Just in case you view the C3 Aircross as merely a little car dressed up as an SUV, here’s what Citroen has to say: “A genuine SUV, it offers protection, robustness, easy access and a feeling of safety, along with assertive…” and then there are some meaningless adjectives about the styling. That statement is partly true, because although you will FEEL like you’re in an SUV on account of being perched up high, the C3 is still a small car with a short bonnet, so you’ll never feel quite as unassailable as you would in a bigger SUV crossover type thing, like a Kia Sportage or whatever. And Euro NCAP is yet to test this version of the C3 Aircross, albeit the last one got a maximum five-star rating, which bodes well. Standard safety stuff is as you’d expect from a modern car, much of it mandated by safety laws now anyways. It’s got sensors all over the place, inside and out, and they’ll tell you when you’re about to hit something, or steer out of lane, or need a break, or are spending too much time looking at the touchscreen. And this is quite likely because, as usual in a Citroen, the touchscreen isn't that intuitive. It is better than the screens in the Citroens of yore, though. 'Yore' meaning a couple of years ago.

You’ll hear Citroen banging on about the car’s ‘Advanced Comfort’ suspension, and saying “magic carpet effect” with zero irony. In fairness to the company, the car is exceptionally comfortable. It glides across the road in soft, pillowy fashion, treating your backside in much the same way that… and we don’t say this lightly… a Range Rover would. It's obviously not a Range Rover – it’s nowhere near as quiet or generally luxurious, if that needs saying – but it’s genuinely refreshing to drive something small and cheap that shoots for proper comfort rather than hard-edged “sportiness”. Even the seats themselves are flat and soft and relaxing. It follows that the C3 Aircross is about as dynamic as Oasis’s rhythm guitarist. It’s the very opposite of ‘fun to drive’, mainly because the body rolls quite a lot and the steering is lighter than a Televangelist’s grasp of science. All that said, it’s a bit better than the C3 Aircross used to be – a bit less clumsy and roly-poly. The only reason we’ve not given the Aircross a five score here is because, as ever with a Citroen, anyone over six-foot tall will find the ‘outstretched arms, folded up legs’ driving position sub-optimal.

While it’s great that Citroen has given this a seven-seat option, the rearmost seats aren’t really suitable for... anyone, basically. They massively hamper boot space, too, both in volume and general usability terms. The five-door version's 460-litre boot capacity is reduced by more than a quarter with the extra seats, and while in most seven-seaters the rear seats fold down to leave a raised, flat floor in the boot, these ones don’t. Instead, you get a big board to place over the top of them. A board that’s too big to keep in the car when the seats are up. So you just have to leave it in your kitchen or garden or whatever. You can't keep it in what's left of the boot, because what's left is a 40-litre space. You'll have bags for life bigger than that. Citroen has also pushed the middle row of chairs forward in the seven-seater, meaning it has less rear leg space. Basically, while this is probably THE most practical and flexible small SUV on the market, you can’t use it as a day-to-day family wagon for all five of your kids. The Dacia Jogger does that sort of thing better. Or, obviously, a full-sized seven-seat SUV. But that'll be at least twice the price. Thankfully the spec sheet is much more generous than the leg space in the boot. Two trim levels, called Plus and Max, with the former providing air con, alloys, touchscreen, CarPlay, Android, automatic wipers. That said, we’d encourage you to bump to Max if you can, because the two-tone roof makes the car look much better, it’ll heat your bum and your hands, you can charge your phone wirelessly, and you’ll be told if there’s something in your blind spot. (It’s actually a bit vexing that an important safety feature like blind spot monitoring is limited to a top-spec car, but there you go.)

Unless you’re thinking about an electric C3 Aircross (and we recommend you do, because it’s a very good value EV), your engine choice basically comes down to whether you want an automatic gearbox or not. The hybrid comes with one, the basic 1.0-litre petrol does not. There’s negligible difference between the two in performance or refinement terms, and any advantage the hybrid gives up in fuel economy (about 5mpg on paper, probably close to 10mpg in real life) is negated by the additional cost of the thing. We actually like Citroen’s 1.0-litre engine (which is utilised in both), because it’s pretty quiet at low speed, quick enough to do the job (albeit with seven people in the car you should avoid going uphill) and is nice and smooth for a small three-cylinder petrol unit. We’d take the hybrid though, because the automatic gearbox is much better suited to the nature of the car – it makes for an easier, more stress-free experience. And Citroen manual gearboxes are always... meh.