Road Test: Citroen DS5 THP 200 Sport

It’s not easy to pigeon hole the new Citroën DS5 but that’s exactly what Ray Leathern wants to do.

It’s admission time and my admission is that I feel there is quite a lot of misdirection going on with the new Citroën DS5. So far as I can tell, the DS5 is a spacious, well appointed, five-door hatchback with a turbocharged power plant. It’s a full five-seater with ample SUV-like interior room, but flying in the face of the crossover trend, it doesn’t have increased ride height or off-road tendencies like a Nissan Qashqai or Volkswagen Tiguan.

It has 147 kW and 275 Nm of torque from the perennial, 1.6 litre turbocharged engine. This gets the DS5 to 100 km/h from a standing start in 8.2 seconds and on to a top speed of 235 km/h. That’s fair by today’s standards, but it doesn’t really stack up against the fully hot-to-trot hot hatch brigade. On the surface of it, the DS5 is like a French army knife then, quick-ish, pretty spacious, fairly handsome and not badly equipped. Ahem, excuse me; is this not a jack of all trades, master of none scenario? I’m sure you will agree, however, that the DS5’s styling is very easy on the eye. You might even qualify it as one of the trades the French marquee has mastered of late. Although it’s hard to catch a flat reflection of your trendy self in the car, I think they’ve missed a trick by not giving the back doors Honda Civic or Alfa like inset door handles. A raked A-pillar certainly gives it loads of that Blade Runner, futuristic, but contemporary style.

The frontend has been given the requisite creases and crevices of a new model over the fog lights, radiator grilles and so on. The enormous and slightly ambiguous Citroën DS emblem seems to have grown even bigger since the DS4 and it’s a feature my five-year old nephew absolutely loves. Stepping inside you are immediately struck by the feeling of space. The glass roof on my test unit lightens the dark rubber dash interior brilliantly and despite the wonderfully comfy, ribbed leather seats and chunky switch gear, you could almost get lost in the DS5’s interior.

It took me several minutes to adjust my driver’s seat into a comfortable position. It took me even longer to find the side mirror adjusters, or how to move the head-up display, or the how to open the windows. I absolutely loved that about the DS5 though. I climbed in and lost myself immediately. Lots of people want a bit of escapism in their car. The DS5 can give it to you. The speedometer and rev counter were both a little disappointing I have to say. Disappointing in the way they looked like Swatch watches and could have come off the Citroën C3 for example. Uninspiring dials aside, the DS5 gets two massive Gallic thumbs up for its gloriously fun interior.

All the superficial stuff done well, just as you’d expect from the French. Driving the DS5 is another matter though. When I say driving, I don’t mean pushing it to the boundaries of its performance, testing the limit of grip, or any such typical fun stuff. It is abundantly clear from the first moments on the road that this is not a driver’s car. In fact the Citroën puts as much satisfaction into what you want to do behind the wheel as a French waiter might in bringing you your order promptly. Sure, you can mash it through the gears,  accelerate hard away from the lights and it actually feels a bit faster than the figures suggest, but as quirky as it may be in some ways, for a person like me who genuinely enjoys driving, I find it tiresome. When all you want to do is drive, it twists its moustache and smirks at you every step of the way. Here are some sources of frustration in an otherwise good car.

The gear shift is sticky and it creeks against the plastic of the centre console. The electric power steering is over assisted. This lack of feel isn’t helped by quite a lot of intrusive torque-steer.  If you can drive fast and without inducing tyre squeal you should be illegible for the next NASA space mission. The DS5 looks like it might be the next NASA craft so you’ll feel right at home. The brake pedal managed to feel very loose in my test unit. Initial bite from the brakes was a bit too heavy, but then the stopping power isn’t as good as you’d hoped.

Again, the electronic stability control can be switched off; just as long as you don’t do any spirited cornering or it will override you and turn straight back on again, which is annoying. Even the award winning 1.6-litre turbocharged engine ticks over at idle with the sound of a piece of cardboard in the spokes of your old BMX, hardly a sound to make others quake at the lights. Then the turbo lag is noticeable, with boost sloshing up a few moments after you wanted it. Don’t get me wrong. I love this little maestro of an engine, I just think a big, heavy bodied DS5 isn’t suited to the fizzing response the turbo engine offers. The DS5 HDi might be a little more up its street.

Yep, it might sound like I’m having a right go at the DS5, but I realise now I’ve pegged the car wrong. Trendy is bourgeois, trendy is uncommon, trendy is complicated, trendy is tedious and trendy is everything the Citroën DS5 is. It doesn’t have a practical SUV-like ground clearance or a real ripsnorter of an engine to obliterate all comers at the lights, but you must admit that it does everything right enough in its fussy, French kind of way. The Citroën DS5 isn’t sensible or good to drive, but it is stylish, comfortable and really quite special to look at and spend time in. That should surely be enough for people of a trendy persuasion?

What we like…

• Futuristic styling looks like it came straight off the drawing board.
• Very comfortable and lots of standard kit.
• It’s an event to drive every day.

What we would like…

• For it to do the diving bit with as much fun as it does everything else.
• The squeaky interior to be better nailed together next time.
• I don’t know, just a little bit more class in the way it carries itself.

Images supplied courtesy of Matteo Conti Photography.

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