From £19,720

French firm’s new, comfort-first family hatchback has echoes of a 1970s great

The funky-looking Citroën C4 has been one of the French brand’s best-sellers in the UK since its third generation arrived in 2021. A big departure in terms of design and quality from the car it replaced, the third C4 was claimed to pick up on Citroën's long tradition of innovation in the hatchback segment.

But is it really that innovative? You’ll need a pretty long memory to recall a genuinely groundbreaking Citroën family hatchback. It’s more than 50 years since the critically acclaimed GS won European Car of the Year in 1971, a gong that Citroën has won only twice since. The BX, ZX and Xsara that came later had plenty of fans throughout the following decades, but it’s definitely the aura of the GS that Citroën is now referencing with a new C4 that puts comfort and efficiency first.

C4’s various rhomboid details are the first styling nods to the 1971 Citroën GS, and a long sloping bootlid, with the spoiler on its trailing edge, is the second. It's aerodynamic too. We liked it.

This is a car that has been inspired by its customers, says Citroën. An amalgam of typical hatchback and compact SUV design, it’s claimed to have a bold, high-rising but tapering outline, a roomy, versatile and relaxing interior and plenty of options for individual customer configurability.

Now, four years after its launch, the C4 has been given a facelift to bring it up to date with a swath of new and updated rivals in the bulging C-segment.

While most of the time spent was on updating its interior and giving it a fresh look, underneath Citroën has fettled the C4’s offerings, ditching its diesel and entry-level petrol powertrains along with the option of a manual gearbox. Left are the two hybrid options and a single pure-petrol powertrain, which can each be paired with three trim levels.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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Citroen C4 review 2025 002 side panning

When the C4 was launched in 2021, it was welcomed, especially by Autocar road testers, as something that was genuinely interesting and unusual in a fairly homogenised hatchback class. It was seen as alternative but cohesive; rich in visual intrigue, but not fussy or overwrought.

The refresh builds on this and introduces a front-end makeover that is again just as visually intriguing as the car it replaces. Drawing inspiration from the 2022 Oli and 2024 C5 Aircross concepts, the nose is centred around Citroën’s new logo – inspired by the original badge from 1919 – which is flanked by new squared-off LEDs, which replace Y-shaped headlights, and a widened profile. 

According to design boss Pierre Leclercq, the goal was to make the C4 “more technical looking” while also giving it a “wider and cooler” stance. Aside from the badge at the rear being replaced by 'CITROËN' – which follows other brands in the Stellantis stable and does give genuine lick of premium to those cars – and a new design for the chunky plastic cladding around the wheel arches and sills, there are minimal other design changes of note.

What remains, then, are the car’s standout features such as a raised ride height, high bonnet and elevated beltlines, which give it the presence of a compact SUV, sitting more than 150mm off the ground (a lot for a standard hatchback). 

Citroën offers six exterior colours, the option of a two-tone roof (exclusively in top-end Max trim) and the choice of two colour clips – a thin strip that allows owners to add a touch of personalisation to their car, Citroën says, and our Max trim test car’s gold really did stand out. Alloy wheels are 18in standard across the range.

INTERIOR

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Citroen C4 review 2025 007 dash

Citroën’s comfort-led positioning of this car makes for a medium-high driving position, something that sits – like the car itself – between hatch and SUV. For some, that will make it too low, for others too high.

For the facelift, Citroën has fitted new 'Advance Comfort' seats in the C4, which are visually bulging with padding – 15% more than the slightly flat but broad seats they replace. Leclercq says they are intended to show comfort as well as providing it.

C4’s centre stack makes quite a classy first impression and includes physical heating and ventilation controls with an inviting metallic feel.

We will describe how they feel on the move shortly, but the first impressions are that they feel largely similar to the seats they replace. Yes, they definitely offer more lateral support and comfort than before and, say, the similarly priced and positioned Kia Stonic or Skoda Kamiq. But the extra padding can be a tad hard in the upper back area – and it's not adjustable – and there is a lack of under-thigh support. The seat itself is adjusted manually, which means that finding the right seating position is harder than it might otherwise be, but then this is one area that allows Citroën to keep prices down. Heated seats are offered in Max trim only.

Available space around the driver is about average. Citroën claims class-leading rear knee room, but we suspect this must be qualified by the front seats being slid all the way forwards because, with the driver’s seat set for a typical adult, second-row accommodation levels are only average, as is rear head room.

Boot space below the parcel shelf is 380 litres, another quite average showing. This is, of course, a pretty compact car for the European C-segment, but it’s unlikely to be one you’ll be drawn to for its practicality.

The instrument and infotainment layout is unconventional, but it doesn’t lack clarity and it isn’t made hard to interact with. Ahead of the driver is a now updated 7in digital instrument screen that provides a very simple digital speedometer but little else at much scale. In 2025, the screen also feels old and outdated compared with rivals.

Our test car’s head-up display, projected on a separate transparent pop-up screen (which was quite large) rather than the windscreen, adds some useful extra information, but options to configure both displays are limited. The ability to change the position of the head-up display using easy-to-reach controls next to the driver was a nice touch.

The cabin is centred around the same 10in infotainment system – now with updated software as part of the facelift – above two physical controls for Home and Vehicle and a volume knob to aid usability. There are also tactile and materially appealing physical controls for heating and ventilation.

The infotainment itself, while running updated Stellantis software, is a tad sluggish and faffy to use. While it offers some large icons at surface level, a deeper delve into the system requires more tuned touches, which means more time looking at the screen while driving. It does offer wireless smartphone mirroring, plus wireless, USB-A and USB-C charging capabilities.

The factory navigation mapping is simple but clear, its directions are easy to follow and you can set destinations in spoken commands at the first time of asking.

The standard of material fit and finish is a bit mixed and the cabin isn’t free from harder, rougher mouldings in easy-to-reach places. Our top-rung test car’s cabin offered a pleasant aesthetic on the surface, with its plush-looking seats, but in reality it was quite a dull affair, with everything ahead of the front occupants being black or dark grey. The extensive use of gloss black plastic, as is the case across the Stellantis range – especially Peugeots – highlights fingerprints and makes a clean cabin look dirty very quickly and easily

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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Citroen C4 review 2025 018 front cornering

As part of the 2025 update, the entry-level 99bhp 1.2-litre petrol engine has been dropped from the line-up, meaning the C4 can no longer be had with a manual gearbox.

As such, the only non-electrified option is now the mid-range 128bhp 1.2-litre petrol engine, with an eight-speed automatic gearbox. This is flanked by a new 99bhp 1.2-litre mild-hybrid petrol, mated to a six-speed dual-clutch automatic, at the base of the line-up, and the same set-up with 134bhp – as can be found in the Fiat 600, Jeep Avenger and Peugeot 208 – at the top. Both hybrid options offer small amounts of electric-only driving.

Enthusiasts should look away now: on B-roads, the C4 is dynamically happiest at a temperate 45-55mph amble, where its steering and suspension seem to respond best.

For our test of the facelifted C4, only the 134bhp hybrid (badged Hybrid 136) was available. In the hybrid, the 'self-charging' 0.43kWh battery pack can really offer only a mile or two of electric driving but, given its size, it charges quickly – and you can tell this because the powertrain’s regenerative braking is set quite high in all three driving modes (Sport, Normal and Eco), with no option to adjust it. Although it feels sharp at first, it is rather easy to get used to.

Citroën claims that, typically, up to 50% of driving time will be done in electric-only mode. On our test route, which combined towns, motorways and mountain roads, we found that to be closer to 20%, and most of our driving took place in towns. 

When more power is called for, the transition from electric to combustion drive is relatively calm, but it does tend to change rather quickly, mainly given the size of the pack. Although this tech is meant to aid economy, we were able to achieve only 38mpg on our test route.

The six-speed automatic gearbox feels like it’s geared just a little on the long side, to benefit cruising economy and refinement rather than acceleration and responsiveness. To compound that, the accelerator needs a little bit of a poke, almost like you're asking it to wake up from a long nap, to apply overtaking power. (There is no kickdown here.) Even so, the car makes respectable progress, and while there are clearly faster hatchbacks for the money, this one avoids feeling slow.

Thankfully, it doesn’t hunt around too much for a ratio when you apply some power. Shifts come slightly lazily and not always as smoothly as they probably should, but decisively enough.

Of the three driving modes, Eco dulls the engine response quite markedly and also makes the gearbox very reluctant to downshift and very keen to upshift. This mode is useful only if you want to explore the outer limits of the car’s potential for economy on a long, quiet cruise. Sport mode allows the gearbox to shift a lot more intuitively. However, in all modes, even though paddles are present, there’s no way to select a gear manually and to be sure that the car will hold that gear under maximum load, which can be an annoyance.

RIDE & HANDLING

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Citroen C4 review 2025 019 rear cornering

The C4 can be a curious and quite strange car to drive, or a more competent and inoffensive one, depending on where it’s operating.

In an attempt to make it easy to operate around town and to engineer in some extra-relaxing urban comfort, Citroën has tuned the power steering (quite gently geared anyway, at 2.8 turns between locks, and commanding a 10.9m turning circle, which is pretty large for a smallish car) to feel really light around town and at low speed. It requires very little physical effort when manoeuvring, but also gives you very little to push against when you’re sweeping around a traffic island or changing lanes on the gyratory, making the car feel unusually flighty.

I’d like to think there are route nationale roads in France that the C4’s suspension works on really well, but it might be wishful thinking. On craggier and less gently undulating UK B-roads, you have to adopt a gentle pace to get a flavour of it

It’s all the harder to become used to because above 30mph much of the weight that the steering has been missing duly materialises. At an unhurried 45-55mph cross-country potter, the car is much easier to place. It can roll and loll a little on a B-road even at this speed, but it generally goes where you expect it to and keeps control of its body. Go faster and the car’s gathering body movement gets unsettling, and it clearly doesn’t have the dynamic versatility of the class’s really well-rounded dynamic operators.

Choose your speed carefully and, out of town at least, the C4 can be agreeable enough, then. It doesn’t respond receptively to being hurried, and those relatively skinny tyres don’t produce much outright lateral grip when you do, although the car’s electronic stability control acts pretty subtly, and effectively, to counteract understeer when it inevitably presents, so the C4 remains stable in most circumstances. But it’s not a car to easily take to, to gel with, or to enjoy driving in anything more than a fairly disinterested way.

Much of the success of this car’s positioning rests on its refinement and it operates quietly in objectively measurable terms when the surface is smooth – such as on our test run on the outskirts of Barcelona. Those skinny wheels and tyres and the hydraulic mountings in the suspension make sizeable contributions to that, as does the aerodynamic body design.

The car doesn’t feel particularly calm or especially comfortable in subjective terms, though. There’s an agreeable lope and float about the ride over longer-wave undulations taken at just the right speed (namely, that 45-55mph cross-country gait).

But there’s not quite enough rubber-footed isolation about the secondary ride to complement that sense of glide to really set this car’s ride up for glowing praise.

The axles clump and reverberate a little over sharp ridges and drain covers in a way that you just don’t expect them to with that suspension specification, while at greater speeds body control can deteriorate to a point where you certainly wouldn’t describe what results as comfortable.

MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Citroen C4 review 2025 001 front tracking

The C4 offers pretty obvious value for money as a family hatchback. The entry-level You trim, exclusively available with the 99bhp mild-hybrid, starts from £22,295, rising to £26,625 for the top-rung Max with 134bhp hybrid. 

One or two rivals are cheaper still, but when you consider that this car comes with 18in wheels, a widescreen infotainment system, a basic autonomous emergency braking system and curtain airbags for both rows of passengers, it offers plenty for the money. 

Residuals are no selling point but not awful: CAP expects the C4 to get parity with a Kia Ceed and to shade a Ford Focus.

Although we did not achieve it during our test run, this car’s potential to return more than 55mpg on longer runs might well appeal to some and, thanks to the generous-for-a-hatchback 50-litre tank, it would make for a range of more than 600 miles between fills. 

VERDICT

Citroen C4 review 2025 025 front static

Citroën’s updated third-generation C4 is, funky exterior apart, summed up by one word: sensible. 

Although it is not a particularly practical mid-sized hatchback in outright terms, given its small boot and average rear leg room, it is quite well priced and well equipped and has some useful features that promise to make it agreeable to live with.

It has rational and irrational appeal but lacks a fine-tuned execution

For a small family looking for a car that can do all the basics easily and without fuss while offering good economy and a relaxing, long-striding classic Citroën vibe, the C4 ticks all of those boxes – and at an appealing price too. Yes, more could have been done to liven up the interior, especially when you look at what stablemate Peugeot does with the same architecture. But still.

So if you’re looking for a good-value family hauler that stands out from others in the segment, the C4 should be on your shortlist. But for those who value practicality or the driving experience more highly, other cars do this better.

Will Rimell

Will Rimell Autocar
Title: News editor

Will is Autocar's news editor.​ His focus is on setting Autocar's news agenda, interviewing top executives, reporting from car launches, and unearthing exclusives.

As part of his role, he also manages Autocar Business – the brand's B2B platform – and Haymarket's aftermarket publication CAT.

Citroen C4 First drives