Ours gets plenty as standard: Citroën’s suspension equipped with hydraulic bump stops, a crash mitigation system with pedestrian and cyclist detection, cruise control with speed limit detection, auto-dipping LED headlights and memory foam front seats.
The only options on mine are metallic paint and lane-keeping assistance, neither of which ought to affect its running efficiency.
A C-Series Edition car would have opened the door to things like heated leather massage seats and parking assistance, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted leather in the car in any case, and I don’t use those gimmicky parking systems, so it definitely would have been £2500 wasted on what’s already a pretty expensive car.
Preliminary driving impressions are good, that dream taxi flavour having lasted well through my first week. I’m still really enjoying arriving at photoshoots calmly and comfortably, and I’ve already managed a weekend away in Cornwall with my girlfriend and a surfboard, among other things.
It was a disappointment to find that she had to sit behind me in order to make room for the board, but a roof rack would sort that problem and wouldn’t be hard to fit to the available roof bars.
As already mentioned, I don’t expect to be able to do much charging of the car’s battery in the natural run of things, but this seems to me to be a lot to do with the way the UK’s public charging infrastructure is developing. All of the new charging stations you see now are for dedicated DC rapid charging of fully electric vehicles, and very few PHEVs come with CCS ports for this, so PHEV drivers are left with little to do if they, like me, can’t charge at home.
I don’t often visit those supermarkets and out-of-town retail parks that sometimes have free-to-use AC ‘slow’ chargers. And so while I might be able to plug in at the Autocar office to test that 41-mile electric-only range claim once or twice, I fear that it won’t be a regular thing. Financially as well as practically for a great many of us, the charging of PHEVs is becoming precisely the afterthought that some feared it might be.
