Citroen C1 review (2014 - 2020)

Developing a new car is an expensive business, and more and more manufacturers have begun collaborating with each other to share the costs. One of the most successful such projects saw Toyota, Citroen, and Peugeot build a joint city car that launched in 2005. The mechanical components were common to all three versions, and all the cars were built on the same production line in the Czech Republic. The three cars – the Toyota Aygo, the Peugeot 107 (later 108) and the Citroen C1 – all looked different, as each company put its own design stamp on them, but underneath they were exactly the same. The Citroen C1 sold so well that when it was time to update it in 2014, the French brand enthusiastically continued the collaboration.

The second-generation C1’s cute and quirky design will appeal to urban car owners and young drivers. There’s even a quasi-convertible version, called Airspace, with a cloth roof that rolls back to create an open-top car.

It’s all pretty basic inside, with hard, shiny plastics and cloth seats, but that’s understandable for a car built to a budget. There’s a single binnacle displaying the speedometer above the steering wheel and a set of controls located in the centre of the dashboard, which includes a seven-inch touchscreen system on all but the entry-level model.

Tall drivers shouldn’t feel too cramped inside the C1, because it feels surprisingly spacious, given its teeny dimensions. The same can’t really be said for the back seats, but this is a small car, so you don’t buy it to transport a five-a-side football team. The cramped rear is compounded if you go for a three-door, model which requires some degree of contortion from adults to access the rear seats. The five-door version is only a few hundred pounds more and worth the money for the additional practicality.

The boot also has a limited capacity, with just 196 litres of space, and the Citroen’s main rivals offer more space. Another trio of jointly developed cars – the Volkswagen Up, the Skoda Citigo and the Seat Mii – have 251-litre boots, while the Hyundai i10 has 252 litres and the (also related) Kia Picanto offers 255. You can fold the rear seats of the C1 down to create 780 litres, but the load space isn’t completely flat.

The C1 is a fine little urban runabout. It has light steering and a small turning circle, which makes it very usable in town, but it’s not what you would call accomplished on faster roads. It’s agile enough, but there’s noticeable body roll when cornering, and the suspension struggles to soak up bumps, so it feels a bit unsettled.

With just small petrol engines to power it, and minimal soundproofing between the engine bay and the cabin, it can get a tad raucous on the motorway or when you start hustling the C1 along. If you also have an Airspace with the fabric roof open, get ready to turn the music up and forget about relaxed conversation.

The C1 launched with three trim levels, known as Touch, Feel, and Flair. The entry-level Touch model is quite bare, but every other version has a seven-inch touchscreen infotainment system with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto smartphone connectivity, but it doesn’t seem to work with every type of phone, so it’s worth checking this out before you buy. Feel trim gets a DAB radio as standard, while Flair adds a reversing camera, among other elements.

Citroen added a number of special edition models over the years, so don’t be surprised to find obscurely named trims such as the Feel Edition, Feel Edition Lagoon, Feel Edition Sunrise, Furio, JCC-, Origins, Urban Ride, Elle, and the Flair Edition.

All the different versions of the C1 are powered by efficient, three-cylinder petrol engines, mated to a five-speed gearbox, so fuel costs should be manageable for most owners.

Up until 2019, buyers of new C1s had a choice of a 1.0-litre unit producing 68bhp and a 1.2-litre unit producing 82bhp, but the larger engine was later dropped from the line-up. Both officially return in excess of 65mpg, which means that they should be able to manage 55mpg in real-world use.

Both engines also emit CO2 at a rate of less than 100g/km, so road tax (officially known as Vehicle Excise Duty, or VED) will be very low: cars registered before 31 March 2017 will be exempt from tax completely, while cars first registered after 1 April 2017 are liable for £150 per year.

Insurance costs are also low, as the various different versions of the C1 fall into groups 7 to 11, which makes it an ideal purchase for the younger drivers at whom Citroen is targeting the car. If you’re an older driver – the other group the C1 is aimed at – insurance costs are likely to be very low indeed. That said, some of the C1’s rivals have even lower groups, with the Hyundai i10 starting at Group 2.

The C1 requires servicing every 12 months or 9,300 miles, whichever comes first, with costs for this starting from around £120. Citroen does have servicing plans available for owners of new and nearly new C1s, which cover the first three years or 35,000 miles. Prices start at around £750, if paid in advance in a single payment, or £22 a month, if paid via a direct debit. There’s also a fixed-price servicing package available for cars that are more than three years old, which makes it possible to budget for maintenance costs.

It’s mostly good news on the reliability front for the C1. Firstly, this second-generation of the C1 uses a lot of the mechanical parts that were developed for the first generation, so they’re well and truly tried and tested.

Another upside is that city cars tend to be pretty basic underneath, so there aren’t as many things that can go wrong, compared to a big, expensive premium model with lots of electronic components, for example. This is true for the C1, so even if something does go wrong, it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg to fix.

And while Citroen hasn’t enjoyed the best reputation for reliability in recent years – some customer satisfaction surveys of brands tend to place the French marque pretty low down, sometimes as far as the bottom five – its development partner Toyota is a different story. The Japanese company has a very good name when it comes to building solid, reliable cars that rarely go wrong, so its input into the Aygo/108/C1 project should mean the C1 will fare better than many of the other models in Citroen’s line-up.

In terms of warranty, the C1 has a rather disappointing three-year/60,000-mile cover package, which compares unfavourably not only with the virtually identical Aygo, which has five years and 100,000 miles of cover, but also with the Kia Picanto, which has a seven-year warranty.