cjard

Ugh.. VWAGs diesel lumps really dont inspire me. 4 cylinders, loud diesel clatter, plastic timing belt tensioners and followers.. A friend who test drove a 57plate A6 said the lack of refinement from the engine was a serious blow to the image of the car, and he far preferred the 5 cylinder in the volvo. The old mondeos with the 1.8 Endura may be simple but that wouldnt really apply to a modern one. Apparently the dual mass flywheel has a propensity to wreck the clutch and slave cylinder if they arent all changed a tthe same time.. While bits may be cheap, its better not to be fixing them often. Take a check in the VOlvo forums and see if you can find one thing that the 2.4 diesels are renowned for breaking down over.. I struggled! Vanity, ya sure.. Volvo has a stigma that wont woo some, but noone can deny that the modern volvos are among the most interesting and unique looking cars on the road. During Ford's ownership they got a sense of style and now have some very good looking cars. Add to the mix that they are well screwed together with materials whose quality is up there with the german marques, they nearly all have cruise control, a good number of them have stuff like heated front windscreens and seats (godsend in cold weather here), even the base models are supremely comfortable with seat adjustments, reach and rake, they target the taller-than-average market (great for me at 6'5; in contrast the C5 seats are awful) and perhaps that volvo ar ethe only people who can make an estate that isnt pig-ugly and you actually get to a very sensible Mondeo-priced conclusion.. Not that this debate is supposed to be a marque issue, more a fuel issue, but you'll struggle to beat a modern Volvo.. Give em a thought next time youre lining up the top marques :angry:

I take pretty much all of your points on board. I actually now drive an 04 Volvo S60 D5 that I picked up for £5500 about 6 months ago. At 185bhp it goes like stink and easily outpaces the 1.8 Honda Accord I had before.. But that Accord was £700 and I have to admit that though the Volvo is 50% more economical, the 300 miles a week that I do (compared to 600 in the honda) since I moved nearer work and bought a bicycle make this particular diesel very, very expensive. In its favour it is supremely comfortable and a much better car. I never stopped to work out how long it would take me to recoup the price diff (see below) in savings of economy alone (prob never), but I also have to attribute some consideration to the comfort and image factor of the S60 vs the battered old honda. While some people might not understand your argument, £2800 divides up into a lot of miles at a difference of 3p per mile (assuming depreciation to £2000 over the years i will drive it) - somewhere in the region of 6 years payback at 15K a year.. and youre darn right that diesel is disgusting; it doesnt evaporate off your hands like petrol does and pumps are always thick with the awful stuff.. Overall though, I like the car, its comfy, quiet, powerful and smooth. It does the job. I think what we must really come to appreciate is that, total cost of ownership over three years from new to 3 years old will probably be about the same; diesels command premiums that offset economy, diesels are getting more powerful, petrols more economical.. At the end of the day the fuel choice will be largely academic for the most part. Pick for reasons of vanity, environmental conscience or placebo/illusion that youre saving money with (insert your choice here).. I've decided that my next car will be an S-Type R while I'm young and stupid enough to enjoy it and we arent priced off the road.. The price of petrol will continue to rise and rise. If it got to £5 a litre would you stop buying it? Really? It's still cheaper than beer at that price. If you could afford to get to work, you'd still buy it.. Motoring as a whole is an increasingly expensive freedom, and the choice of fuel is largely irrelevant

I think this point you make may actually be pivotal to discounting your argument to be honest. The usage profile of a taxi and the usage profile of a normal car are very, very different. As you note the taxi works all day, running nearly continuously; components never get chance to cool down, starve of oil, collect condensation or take a set as they go cold. Because they have to work, problems manifest are fixed sooner rather than later because a stitch in time really does save nine if your car is your living. Additionally taxi drivers are far more experienced, natural drivers than the average crappy standard of a british driver and I'd expect they are much better with their gear changes, clutch use, hill starts etc.. If they have some relationship with you that makes them want to care for your car, then they are more likely to do so than the average guy who bought his own car and he'll darn well kick the crap out of it if he wants. From cold. To be honest, i'd expect a taxi to outlast a normally used car for a variety of reasons.. Your car does more in the 3 years you own it than most cars will do in 10 and because cars are designed to run, not stop, they probably work a whole lot better as taxis..

I'll see if I can get a different garage (who know how to check alignments) to check the setup. On full lock there is a pronounced lean on the inside tyre, but I'm sure this is a design consideration and Mercedes do it too. My Mitsubishi GTO does it a little but doesnt have any slow issues.. I'll take a crayon and rub the tyre face with it when I go to Asda, few circles in the carpark should be able to feel which way the tyre is scrubbing.. What concerns me is that that the car will change direction slightly if cornering at speed and I hit a puddle with the outside wheel; the loss of grip and lube from the water added to the push from the inside wheel make the car step out a little and though nowhere as significant as the Merc E-Class I drove recently that had a worn suspension bush (somewhere, not sure where; it wasnt me that fixed it) it's not desirable! It definitely doesnt "dance" though, like the mondeo I had; I'd fitted some replacement wishbones to try and stop a clunking fron the suspension, and the pattern ones didnt sit right in their cups, pushing the wheels 6 degrees out of alignment on each side which also altered the camber because the car was effectively "standing on tiptoes" it was truly, truly horrible to drive.. And it doesnt seem to scrub, which is the best indicator of whether tracking is correct.. I just wondered if citroen got the geometry wrong at the extremes of lock.. Will go do some scrub tests..

I have to say, I dont like the way this car handles. Nothing about the way it goes round corners inspires me with any confidence. My biggest issue is with the steering; I know when a car is understeering, and I'm sensitive to the tell tale signs of the front end of a car stepping out on a wet road.. This C5 seems to do it too often, and at very low speeds compared to every other car i've driven. On the multi-storey car park near where I work, the exit ramps require use of full lock and on a wet day the car will actually jump sideways trying to negotiate the bend. On dry gravel car parks, as a test, I crawled forward in 1st gear with the engine idling then put full left lock on and drove round in a semi circle. The depth of the groove in the gravel where the wheel had pushed the gravel to one side indicated to me that something is really awry with the steering geometry on extremes of lock. Citroen say the alignment of the wheels is perfect, and indeed the tyres dont seem to have any abnormal wear on them at all, but this car just doesnt go round corners with any certainty. Is this a known characteristic of these cars, or is there something I can do to improve matters?

A note to say I've reassembled the doors. I played with the locks for a long time trying to make them (the rear driver door had an issue too) repeat the failure but I didnt manage it. Went as far as I could go towards cracking then units open before realising that they are pressed together and i'd need some brazing equipment or very low profile nut and bolt to repair them if I took a grinder to the unit.. In the end I settled for drilling holes in the sealed plastic, letting the water out of the driver rear door one, banging them on the workbench a few times and filling them with a teflon based lubricating spray. They work now, which is more than they did before.. We'll see how long they carry on working for; if they fail again soon I might buy new units..

As described here: http://www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=22388 My C5 suffers the same fault. I've taken some time out to remove the locking unit from the door and removed the black cap from the top of it so I can see the mechanism. Having spent half an hour locking and unlocking the doors, and watching the operation of the levers I can say that I know why the symptoms of the fault show as they do, but I do not know the cause. One of the metal rods (metal-rod) moves in an arc between the cam that the door handle is attached to (handle-cam) and the black plastic lever (black-plastic-lever) that releases the door catch. To lock the car, the metal-rod is rotated out of the gap, making a space between the handle-cam and the black-plastic-lever. Operating the door handle is thus ineffective. To unlock the car, the metal-rod is rotated between the handle-cam and the black-plastic-lever, and transfers the motion of the handle-cam to the black-plastic-lever, releasing the door catch when the door handle is lifted When the lock is exhibiting the problem, the metal-rod fails to rotate as a result of the motor's effort. Unlocking the door with the key incurs a separate mechanical action to rotate the metal-rod, thereby ensuring that the door will unlock with the key. Picture of the lock mech in locked&unlocked, with captions: http://host.photogalaxy.net/thumbs/49168_30032008166_sml.jpg [Open Image] [Hosted by PhotoGalaxy.com] I'm currently at a loss to reproduce the problem effectively, even to the point of holding various components in "half-way" positions to see if excess play of some part of the mechanism is fouling the operation of the lever. I have so far resisted the urge to crack the case open and look at the levers on the motor side of things to see if one of them is broken or misaligned; i can only report what I see from the top. As I havent found many references to this problem, and any solutions would likely be that the entire unit was replaced as appreciable cost, I dont know if I'll get a "yes, that's an expected problem because lever xyz breaks.." repsonse, but hopefully someone else has experienced this. If anyone knows a fix, or knows if other door lock mechs from other Citroen or Peugeot cars will fit and are likely to command less of a price tag, do please let me know.. As an aside, can someone explain the deadlock logic to me? I've read the manual that says somtehing to the effect of: "locking with the remote always arms the deadlock, and flashes the indicators" "locking with the key arms the deadlock, to disarm the deadlock, immediately perform a second locking operation (without performing an unlocking operation) with the key" At some point during my playing, the indicators WOULD flash when I locked with the remote. Now they do not, ever.. So i seem to have disabled deadlocking permanently; how? Also, at some point I noted that if I pressed LOCK on the remote twice, the indicators would flash in a short-on, long-off cycle [on off... on off...] (as opposed to hazard warning lights which are long-on, long-off.. [on... off... on... off...] or "car is unlocked" which is short-on, short-off [on off on off on off]) and they would not stop doing this. What were they signaling? Thanks in advance