A while ago I posted a question on the Twinsclub forum trying to find out what kind of vehicle we should get now we have three children. We had a lot of feedback and responses to our question and in the end we got an extremely good deal on an MPV. We hadn’t originally intended to buy new (I’m seriously opposed to buying new with cars knowing all about depreciation once the car has been driven out of the showroom). Nevertheless, thanks to us knowing a man who knew someone etc we decided to buy a new Citroen C8. It feels like a bus to drive, much wider than our Golf GTI or Nissan Micra and much higher up.

I collected it from Newcastle on Saturday and had a fun drive home in it testing out the sat nav, stereo, 6th gear and cup-holder. All in all it was a good buy.

So a lot of people asked me to let them know what we decided to buy. The key influencing factors were:

vehicle needs to have sliding side doors both sides (this narrowed down our search considerably, and cut out the older versions of the Toyota MPV)

vehicle needs to have decent stereo and coffee-mug holder (I had to compromise on the cup-holder a bit as the Citroen one isn’t great).

vehicle needs to have a bit of punch, i.e. as we do a few long car journeys we need something which can handle motorway driving at 70 mph with ease. We don’t want to have the feeling we are caught in a tornado every time we get in the overtaking lane.

Vehicle needs to be in as low insurance category as possible. This discounted the Chrysler Voyager. We also heard the Chrysler Voyager has a reputation for things going wrong and being costly to repair.

Vehicle needs to have 7 seats and a sensible configuration of seats in the back. Amazingly the Voyager’s configuration was 2-2-3 from front to back. The Citroen is 2-3-2 which works much better for us.

Overall, we’re delighted with the car and we know we’ll have it for at least ten more years. Now all we have to do is learn how to drive it without crunching it when we go through narrow gaps.

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