The cabin creates such an all-round sense of luxury that you start to worry if money has been saved in other areas to pay for it. So you crank the 108bhp engine, pull the funny little gear stalk back into manual mode, pull the right-hand gear paddle and set off.
The first thing that hits you is how refined this 1.6 diesel is and, seconds after that, how staggeringly slowly it drags the Picasso from place to place. In the old Picasso, this engine had only 1313kg to pull; now – before you add extras – that weight has risen to 1539kg, the same weight Jaguar claims for a 3.0 XJ. We took 13.4sec to get it from rest to 60mph, while Citroën says the old Picasso would hit 62mph in 11.9sec. Top speed is 107mph.
Fuel consumption’s also been clobbered. The old Picasso would do 55.4mpg combined, which is what this one does on the gentler extra-urban cycle. Its combined figure is a respectable but inferior 49.6mpg. While on test with us, it managed just 39.6mpg. And it’ll cost more to run as a company car, too, because it is more expensive and chucks out more CO2: 150g/km compared to 136g/km.
If you have a choice, avoid the paddle-shift transmission. Seamless shifting is possible, but needlessly difficult. It’s also uncomfortably jerky in automatic mode.
Things get no better in the corners. The Picasso’s steering appears related only by chance to the front wheels. There’s very little damping control on undulating roads and nothing whatever to appeal to the enthusiast driver.
But the C4 rides beautifully most of the time, which most buyers may regard as a more than fair trade. Beware, though, although it soaks up bumps very well, if you combine soft suspension with a full load and a country road, levels of roll, pitch and heave can become sufficiently uncomfortable to make you slow further. Self-levelling suspension may be part of the answer, but it’s only standard on the Exclusive. The brakes, by contrast, are beyond serious criticism.