Faults:
Well, what can I say, the vehicle belongs to my step dad, personally I drive a Rover 827 and Jaguar Sovereign 3.6, but thought I would mention this vehicle due to its amazing unreliability.
Take a car with a really good initial reception, add a few years and what do you get? A tired, nasty car... amazing that people slate Rovers and Jaguars, IMHO they're miles ahead of this shocking example of modern motoring.
I regularly service and maintain the vehicle once every 6000 miles, with gearbox oil changes and other fluid changes, and how does this lovely car repay me? Number one, the gearbox loses 5th gear, 4th gear and general integrity, great. A large bill for another box, and lost of aggro later, and I finish fitting the box.
Now, last night whilst checking over the engine, marvelling at its smallness compared to my 2.7, I noticed a lovely oil leak from the head gasket, I then removed the rad cap and noticed some serious emulsifying of oil in there, great, now I need to remove the head, strip down, skim and replace the head gasket.
The interior is also very flimsy and plastitronic using low quality (IMHO) materials.
The outer panels are typically French and would appear to be made from paper.
Overly I am not endeared to this family run about and would much rather he got rid and purchased a Rover 200 series.
General Comments:
Now for some positive praise on this motor car. It rides in the traditional Citroen fashion, despite being a normal torsion bar/coil spring setup and is comfortable to drive and ride in.
The interior space is good and it does make a practical hold all, it suits my step dads purposes well but just doesn't have the reliability, ease of working on, and indestructability of my Sovereign or Sterling.
Economy probably scrapes 35MPG, but there's more to life than MPG!!
Overall, the bad points are far outweighing the good, the only Citroens I would consider are the large executive models like the DS/SM/CX and XM, all brilliant cars IMHO, they just seem to have lost their way on the smaller effort. A shame.
23rd Nov 2001, 02:32
In France Citroën has a much better reputation than Rover. However no objective estimations of quality have been carried out to compare ZX to the Rover 400 series. In all the reactions I detect a large amount of local patriotism: for an Englishman vehicles constructed in GB are necessarily better than the ones made in France and vice-versa. There is a long history of love-hate relationships between the two countries.