Car review: Citroën Grand C4 Picasso

Want to feel like a proper adult? Drive this.

A Picasso brings out the adult in all of us.

I had a discussion the other day about when men grow up. A friend explained that when he used to work in a clothes shop he’d fill quieter parts of the day by carefully unwrapping the underwear. He’d then use a chocolate bar to create authentic-looking skid marks before wrapping it up again and putting it back on the shelves. “The beauty was,” he said, “that no one ever brought it back to complain.” I won’t tell you his name, obviously, except to say it begins with an A and ends in A Gill. What I will tell you is that today he’s in his 60s but, given the chance, he said with a big smile, he’d do the same thing again.

I fear I’m just as bad. When I’m told by a passport person to stand behind the line, I simply can’t bring myself to do it. I always position myself so that at least some of one foot is in the forbidden zone. It’s pathetic but I can’t help myself.

Neatly stacked tins in a supermarket make me dizzy, too, because the urge to knock them over is so strong. It’s one of the few things left on my bucket list. But I’ll need to hurry up because I can feel myself getting old. I can sense the rebel in my soul quietening down. It’s not just because I now enjoy a “nice sit-down” more than anything. It’s worse than that. It’s because half the time I can’t be bothered to make a nuisance of myself.

This brings me to the business of renting a car. Queuing up and filling in your details is such a chore. It’s up there with trying on trousers or rubbing sun cream into James May’s back. The only upside is that you’re given the keys to the fastest car in the world. I have always driven hire cars as though my hair were on fire, you see.

This year I rented a house on the Spanish island of Mallorca that sat at the top of a long, narrow and challenging driveway. In the past it wouldn’t have bothered me one bit. I’d have simply ricocheted up it in the hire car, bouncing off the trees and the walls like a large-scale demonstration of Brownian motion. But this year I found myself taking care. And at the end of the 10-day break, the car was handed back without a scratch. It was a first, and it made me think: “Oh dear. At the age of 56 I’ve become an adult.”

The panic, though, is over, because last week Citroën sent round the same car that I had in Mallorca, a Grand C4 Picasso. It had the most extraordinary effect on me: I drove around agreeing with all the callers on talkback, scoffed at girls in ripped jeans, tutted at men with earrings and engaged the handbrake when stationary. This is a car that can accelerate from 0 to 100km/h in 10.1 seconds and can thunder onwards to a speed of nearly 200km/h. But I did neither.

What I did instead was admire the comfy headrests and passenger seats that come with an electrically operated footrest for when the floor is just too uncomfortable. Then there are the sun visors that fold away to reveal a windscreen big enough for a coach, and, further back, an all-glass roof. Further back still, there’s a third row of seats, and storage spaces everywhere you look. This is one of those cars that are hard to resist in the showroom. It’s jam-packed with stuff you’ll want.

Driving it is a different story; there is some quirkiness. The gear lever, for instance, is a flimsy little stalk on the steering column. And nearly everything else is operated by a screen in the middle of the car. That’s fiddly and annoying. Well, it would be, but you’ll be too busy sticking to the speed limit to be overly worried about how you turn off the engine stop-start function. Not that you’d want to turn it off, because it saves fuel and that saves money. And saving money is the single most important thing in life for Citroën owners.

This is not a criticism of Citroën owners. Each to their own. And it certainly isn’t a criticism of the car, because if you want a seven-seater, it makes a deal of sense. You just have to remember that behind the clever design touches there’s a car that’s uninspiring to drive and makes a sound like the incoming-torpedo alert on a submarine if you leave the lights on or open the door when the engine’s running.

On the upside, though, you’ll never crash it. Because you’ll never be going fast enough. Because a Picasso brings out the adult in all of us. That said, just before the delivery driver came to take it away, I was tempted to create some chocolate skid marks on the seat. And say it was like that when it was delivered.

FAST FACTS CITROËN GRAND C4 PICASSO

ENGINE: 2.0-litre, 4 cylinder turbo diesel

AVERAGE FUEL: 4.4 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: 6-speed automatic, front wheel drive

PRICE: From $48,990

RATING: 3 stars