Finally, having seen it for the first time in August, I was able to go and pick the XM up today. After punting about in the temporary ZX since August, I can't tell you what a joy it was to be back in a car in decent condition, and with hydraulics!
The first thing anyone says about an XM is the comfort and that is all there. Amazing ride quality and fantastic seats, adjustable every which way. The only things not to like are the stupid parking brake, and the fact that the A-pillar blocks part of your view of the left-hand wing mirror. That's going to be fun when I take it to France next week.
Although mine is a bottom-spec car, it's very nicely thought out. Often "poverty" cars have switches blanked off, empty dials, or a clock where a rev counter ought to be. There is none of that in my XM; it looks like a complete car. The stereo is excellent, and although I'll be replacing it with a CD player it's good to know that all the speakers are good. To be honest I can live without the extras that higher-spec cars have. Air conditioning, climate control, electric seats and so on are nice but on a car that's reached 15 years of age I'd just be worrying about them going wrong. I'm also very glad that it doesn't have the car status computer because I know how unreliable they are!
Style, confort et luxe. I've enjoyed every single minute I've spent behind the wheel of that car so far.
Tuesday 24 October 2007
Of course, it wouldn't be an old Citroen if it didn't have electrical faults. I have a non-functioning brake lamp, which the car is kind enough to tell me about... most of the time. Oh yes, the car is making me feel at home with a Random Intermittent Electrical Failure!
The bulb is fine; I swapped it with the one from the other side to make sure. I found a bottle of contact cleaner I'd forgotten I had and sprayed it generously all over the housing. Some improvement - both brake lights now work maybe 50% of the time. I'll keep trying...
Sunday 28 October to Sunday 4 November 2007
I'm just back from a week away in France and seriously impressed with that car. I've driven it 1,050 miles in seven days; it didn't break down once; and I felt perfectly relaxed and composed all the way. Those miles included long runs down to the Ile d'Oleron and back. The last time I did a trip of that length was in the CX and it impressed me in exactly the same way with its mile-munching capacity. The combination of empty French autoroutes and big Citroen makes for a very easy way to cross a country in a day.
Despite the innate crapness of XM headlamps I didn't want to give any gendarmes any excuse to interrupt our journey, so I made sure to adjust the headlamps with patent beam benders.
Part of the reason for the total lack of stress on the journey was my birthday present from my folks - a new TomTom Europe satnav system. I've driven with these things once or twice before, but this was the first long trip and I loved it. We would have found the way but Jane did it all for us with no stress, no missed turnings and no arguments. It was also extremely useful to have local speed limits and speed camera warnings posted; I quickly found that I was looking at Jane's screen more than I was looking at the instrument panel... and that the XM's speedo, like all the other cars I've driven with satnav, over-reads by about 7mph - so you're probably safe from speed cameras!
The satnav even helped when we were hungry, pointing out a restaurant in Le Sableau which turned out to be a Le Routier-recommended place serving the most amazing salads, pizzas and veal.
The crack team of Jane the satnav, the XM and I took us straight to the centre.
We took the car because it was the cheapest and most convenient way to get to Dolus, but having it there was also a great convenience - it meant we could get out and about to other places including La Cotiniere, which gave us the best seafood I have ever tasted, bar none.
The week passed quickly with work and trips out to Rochefort and La Rochelle and the time very soon came around to go home. We had to leave damn early to get the boat. The following shows the effect that two hours driving on top of a 6am start with no coffee can have on your photography. Not to mention the effect that two hundred and fifty quid's worth of booze has on your rear suspension some 20 seconds after switching off.
Finally we got back to Dieppe and it was time to load my big old boat onto a big old boat for the journey back to Blighty.
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Fook me but these cars are competent. Astonishingly so. Last week I did the whole long-distance-in-comfort, gentleman's-cruiser, empty-French-autoroute thing and loved it. Tonight I asked Jane to set me a route home from work without any motorways, flicked the suspension into Sport mode and went for it. And bugger me, I own a car that's about a mile wide and two long which handles better than the ZX (which did impress me mightily round the twisty stuff). Every time I drive that car it earns a little more respect.
I own a bottom-of-the-range car which can hold its own as comfy continent-crosser, gentleman's express, and hot-hatch, all in one with just a flick of a switch. I love it.
Sunday, 26 November 2007
I haven't wanted to admit it on here, but my beautiful XM has blotted its copybook lately. I still love it though. In short, it's taken to behaving like most of the water-cooled cars I've owned and picked up some random cooling difficulties. It hasn't overheated at all, it just drops about a litre and a half of water whenever it's asked to sit in traffic. One could argue that such a fine, continent-crossing cruiser simply shouldn't be asked to queue, or one could argue that it's broken. I effortlessly diagnosed a dodgy hose somewhere, but the issue now was to find the bloody thing. Here in Lewes I don't have anywhere quiet to work, I don't have any ramps, and I very rarely see the car in daylight because I work so far away from home.
Clearly, the only answer was a trip to see my mate James.
I loaded the boot with antifreeze and drove up to Surrey. The car didn't lose a drop of coolant on the journey; obviously the airflow at 70 was anough to keep it in the safe zone.
So, up on ramps and leave it running for 20 minutes. Sure enough, coolant started pouring out. The guilty hose was not actually split but very weakened and, of course, right on the bottom of the engine so when I finally worked it off it spilled the whole contents of the cooling system up my arm and all over the road.
We eventually managed to cut the weakened end off and work the hose back onto where it had come from. It will, of course, need replacing eventually but it snakes all over the engine bay so I'm glad to put it off for now.
Sunday, 9 December 2007
We forgot one small but vital operation at the end of the last described procedure. We forgot to bleed the system. Now, the car has been properly cooled but it's been exhibiting some odd symptoms - the low water warning light comes on at random (it's normal for an XM, I know I know) and the temperature gauge sometimes drops to 50 for no obvious reason. So, in a rare moment of seeing-the-car-in-daylight, I went to bleed it. I located the first screw and turned it. Coolant started coming out, all nice and clear as it should be. So I tightened it up - and felt something shift under the screwdriver. Sure enough - the head had come off the sodding PLASTIC bleed screw. Fortunately there was enough poking out that I could get the rest of it out with a pair of pliers.
I was extremely gentle with it. The thing was ready to let go the next time anyone even poked it.
Waxing philosophical for a moment, it's amazing how fragile cars are. One piece of 15-year old plastic goes brittle and shears off (surprise surprise, given the conditions it's been living in) and the next thing you know you have a cooked engine and an enormous garage bill.
Being a Sunday, there's nothing I can do right now. I'll keep you posted...
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Gawd bless the Internet. It's rescued me again. I really needed the car today but there was no way I'd be able to get to a motor factor because of work commitments. Step up the forums over at BXProject, a member of which actually made me a stainless steel bleed screw and posted it to me. It arrived today.
The car was parked in a very poorly-lit area, so I'd planned to drive it to a nearby petrol station and work on it there. Unfortunately, when I got there, I found the car encased in the thickest ice I've ever seen in the UK. Seriously - I haven't seen anything like this since I lived in Nancy. The only way to clear it would be to run the engine with the heater on... which I couldn't do because there was a hole in the system. So, I fitted the screw there, in the dark, with freezing, fumbling fingers and only the screen of my mobile phone to provide any light. If I'd dropped it, I'd have been screwed - fortunately my luck held. I didn't even cross-thread it.
Sunday, 30 December 2007
The XM and I found ourselves at the home of David Rutherford, gentleman engineer and good friend who I met through the forums of the online BXClub. He mentioned that he had kept the headlamp bulbs out of my Mark 1 BX, which he dismantled after our unfortunate accident, because they were the high-output type. We were planning to try them out in the XM, which has notoriously crap headlights, but discovered that it doesn't take H4s. No matter - we would action plan B, the removal of the pointless plastic lenses and cleaning of the glass and reflectors.
It's surprisingly easy to remove the nosecone and expose large areas of serviceable machinery - in fact, by Citroen standards, that's an incredibly accessible engine bay. Three bolts across the top, one behind each sidelight (which unclip) and a screw at each side of the central blade of the grille.
If you look at the port-side headlamp, you can see quite clearly in this picture one of the reasons XM headlamps are so bad. They have a secondary plastic lens behind the glass which goes yellow with age.
Here it is with the glass lens removed. On the advice of the guys at Club XM I removed the yellowed plastic lenses.
We cleaned the reflectors with a meths-based cleaner, but be careful to wipe gently without rubbing - the silvering comes off the reflectors very easily. It's also not a bad idea to clean the glass lenses. David is such a gentleman that he allowed - nay, encouraged - me to do so in his kitchen sink.
Of course, if this site held any pretensions to professionality and impartiality I'd have posted before and after pictures of the beam spread. Fact is, it's only just occurred to me so I shan't. The problem before the mod was that the beam was too small, too dim, and yellowish. Now, it's bright white... and still too small. It only really illuminates a few yards ahead of the car, then you're guessing. If you haven't got main beams on, it's pot luck.
Saturday, 19 January 2008
Remember that intermittent brake lamp? It was getting worse and worse, and the other side had started joining in too, so time to get it sorted.
I went to visit a friend last weekend and during the journey the brake lamps gradually went from working-intermittently to not-working-at-all. Not a situation I want to be in, given what happened to Snoopy, so we went through the wiring with a multimeter as soon as I arrived. As best we could figure, the fault lay in the lamp failure module - but we didn't know where that was in the car and no-one else seemed to either.
So this weekend my favourite engineer friend came to visit me and sorted everything in double quick time - by following the wiring, the multimeter, and his own huge brain he tracked the BFM down in seconds, liberated it from its hiding place and discovered that the problem was simply that the cables had fallen out of their sockets. I wish they were all that easy to fix!
Saturday, 23 February 2008
Driving along the A27 today and the very second I hit cruising speed and lifted my foot off the accelerator there was a loud ptoing and the car seemed to grow an extra aerial. The rubber trim that protects the A-pillar had come loose, and I pulled in at the next parking bay. Sorry for crappy camera phone picture.
I slotted the thing back into place, but it still doesn't seem very secure. I don't know if it's meant to be glued or bonded down... but it doesn't seem to want to be where it is. 10 years of owning crappy old cars, and this is the first time a bit of exterior has made a bid for freedom... I'm embarrassed!
Friday, 2 May 2008
Much as I have enjoyed the XM - and I have loved every minute I've been behind the wheel - it was just no longer making financial sense. Fuel consumption's not that bad at around 32mpg, but petrol prices are going nuts and worst of all my insurance has gone absolutely bonkers - I couldn't find a quote below £480. So it had to go, and it went today; with a full year's MoT on ebay for a mere £370. It would have been nice to have got more, but this isn't the climate for selling big executive cars. The buyer was a really nice bloke though, and I know the car will be well looked after.
All content copyright (c) 1998-2008 Stuart Hedges
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