Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer Review 2023

If you’re looking for a roomy family car then the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer is hard to fault, not only does it have room for seven people but you’ll have space left over for a couple of small suitcases in the boot. 

On the road, it’s comfortable and easy to drive and no models cost the earth to run.

Yet despite being huge inside, comfortable and cheap to run, it’s space-age looks mean this is one sensible car that stands out, making it more desirable than conservative rivals such as Volkswagen's Touran.

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer’s 1.5-litre diesel engine is cheap to run and has plenty of oomph to get the Citroen up to speed even when it’s fully loaded. It’s also smoother and quieter than the more expensive 2.0-litre diesel.

If you mostly drive short distances in town then the 1.2-litre PureTech petrol is worth considering and, as with every model in the range, you can have it with an eight-speed automatic gearbox that gives your clutch footrest in stop-go traffic. It’s an expensive option, though, and also not as smooth as the automatic gearbox fitted to the Volkswagen Touran.

Flair Plus is the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer’s most popular trim level and it comes with lots of handy features that make the car easier to live with.

Keyless entry means no more fumbling in your pockets to get the doors open, its huge glass roof makes the cabin feel light and airy and the active cruise control takes the pain out of long motorway hikes. All you do is set your cruising speed and the car will accelerate and brake for you. 

That being said, even entry-level Touch Plus models have rear parking sensors, passive cruise control and climate control, so they’re far ungenerous with their options.

There are plenty of alternatives worth considering if you’re buying a Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer and the strongest is the Volkswagen Touran. The Citroen doesn’t look as dull as the Volkswagen and it also has more interior space, but the Volkswagen counters with its sturdy build quality and more intuitive design. 

The Kia Carens is also worth a look. It might not have the interior space of either the Citroen or the Volkswagen but it does come with a seven-year, which is four years longer than the ones offered by its rivals. Want a sporty drive? Then consider the seven-seater Ford S-Max, though it’s pricier and not as spacious as Citroen’s alternative.

Most of the Citroen’s Grand C4 SpaceTourer interior plastics are soft and squidgy to the touch. On top of that, the inner door handles have a metal finish and you get metallic trim on the dashboard and steering wheel, while the two-tone plastic colour scheme set things off nicely. 

It’s only when you hunt below your eye line that you’ll find cheaper plastics that are hard and scratchy. In this respect, a Touran has a more consistent feeling of quality. 

That’s also true of the Citroen’s switchgear. The stalks behind the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer’s steering wheel feel light and a little flimsy and the buttons on the dashboard don’t have the precise, oily movement of the ones you’ll find in the Touran.

That said, even basic Touch Plus versions of the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer get dark cloth trim that looks expensive and will hide stains – handy in a family car – while the rest of the range gets half-leather seats. Flair Plus models can be specified with a full leather interior, but it’s an expensive option.

The standard panoramic windscreen, meanwhile, stretches over your head, helping to make the interior feel light and air, especially when it’s combined with the glass roof fitted to Flare Plus models. 

All versions of the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer come with a 12-inch display that sits in the centre of the dashboard with a seven-inch screen sitting below it. 

As well as giving you driving information such as speed and remaining fuel, the larger screen also provides colourful 3D maps for the car’s standard sat-nav system.

It’s powered by TomTom and includes a three-year subscription to that company’s live service. As a result, the sat-nav gets live fuel prices, can find you a parking space and even give you weather updates. TomTom’s magic touch also means it’ll be much better at detecting congestion and steering you round it than the OEM systems fitted to other cars.

That’s just as well though because the screens’ blocky graphics make them look dated and the smaller seven-inch screen is also a pain to use requiring far too many screen prods to do things like entering a postcode. 

It’s a lot easier to give up and use the car’s standard Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which can mirror many of your smartphone’s features onto the car’s seven-inch screen. As well as giving you more intuitive menus, doing this also means you can do almost anything using voice commands.

What it doesn’t improve is the Citroen’s Grand C4 SpaceTourer underwhelming six-speaker stereo, two fewer speakers than you get in a Touran. 

Space is one of the things the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer does best. 

Up front, you get seats like captain’s chairs with individual armrests, although you have to skip the basic Touch Plus model to get a height-adjustable passenger seat. 

Touch Plus models are also the only models not to get a massage function as standard, although it’s far from vigorous, using airbags that feel like they’re being inflated by a convulsing pufferfish.  

Want to ramp up the comfort levels? Then you want the optional RELAX pack (on Flair Plus models) which adds an electrically operated footrest to your front passenger's seat and – in the front and middle rows – headrests that support your head laterally like the ones you get on a jumbo jet. 

Even without this fancy pack, the middle row is very comfortable. Each of your three passengers gets their own separate seat so whoever’s sitting in the centre won’t feel as crushed as they would in a Kia Carens, say. 

As a result, there’s also room to make use of all three ISOFIX points. They’re easy to access and there’s plenty of room to get the base of larger seats fitted with the top half slotting in on top. 

Everyone also gets plenty of adjustment with all three seats reclining and sliding forwards and backwards on floor runners so you can free up more knee room for the people sitting behind or, if there’s no one there, slide the seats right back and lounge out in the resulting acres of legroom. 

The only thing we don’t like is the seat’s low position which does make it feel like your knees are sitting unnaturally high. 

Accessing the last row is a little bit of a squeeze because the middle chairs don’t pivot straight out the way like they do in a Volkswagen Touran. Once you’re in though, even adults will have enough legroom, the only downside is headroom that even average adults will find a bit tight.

One of the beauties of the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer is that even with seven adults aboard, you still get a usable boot – big enough to fit a couple of small suitcases or a kid’s buggy. 

Fold away the back seats and you’ll easily fit a week’s worth of luggage for a family of five and with the middle row stored away too, well, you’re essentially left with an extremely plush van that’ll make short work of flat moves. 

Loading is easy both thanks to the huge boot opening and the Citroen Grand C4 Picasso’s completely flat floor, the only pinch point is folding the seats – they’re heavy and the mechanisms are fiddly and stiff. Folding a Touran’s seats away is a paragon of simplicity by comparison.  

The Volkswagen also offers more consistent interior storage. Okay, so all the Citroen’s Grand C4 SpaceTourer doors have big pockets and all but the basic model get drawers hidden under the front seats, but, oddly, the glovebox is tiny. 

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer dimensions are 4602mm long, 2117mm wide and 1638mm tall.

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer is available with one petrol engine and two diesels, there’s no mild-hybrid offered and it’s not available as a pure-electric either.

Of the three engines, it’s the 130PS 1.5-litre four-cylinder diesel that makes the most sense. It might not sound like much, but the smaller diesel has plenty of grunt where you need it – when overtaking or joining motorways – and it’s also pretty quiet, quieter than the Volkswagen Touran’s 1.6-litre diesel and the Citroen’s larger 2.0-litre.  

The 1.5 diesel’s only slight negative is that it costs more than the noisier three-cylinder 1.2-litre petrol (which is still worth considering if you’ll do most of your driving in town because it offers spritely performance at slower speeds). 

If you do lots of town driving, it’s worth considering the eight-speed automatic, but it’s an expensive option and its jerky changes mean most people will be better off sticking with the standard six-speed manual. That said, the 2.0-litre diesel only comes as an automatic.

If you’re buying a family car, you want it to be comfortable and the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer fits the brief. 

Out of town, the Citroen Grand C4 Picasso takes the strain out of long-distance motorway cruises. It’s quiet at the speed limit with little of the wind noise you get in seven-seater SUVs such as the Land Rover Discovery Sport. Tyre noise is also hushed even on Feel and Flair models, which have wheels an inch larger than the basic car’s 16-inch alloys.

For the most part, the engines are also quiet – the 130PS 1.5-litre diesel proving the quietest of the bunch. Sure, the Citroen’s petrol and 2.0-litre diesel can be a little noisy under acceleration but once you’re up to speed, you’ll barely hear them working. 

The three-cylinder 130PS 1.2-litre petrol sounds quite sporty if you like that sort of thing. 

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer comes with a selection of safety features that increases the further you go up the range.

All models come with a tyre pressure warning system that can alert you to a flat, a system that passively warns you to take a break when driving for long periods, six airbags and three ISOFIX points for the safe fitting of a child seat.

Move up from basic Touch Plus to mid-range Feel Plus and you get equipment such as an electro-chrome rear-view mirror (it reduces the glare of following cars’ headlights), speed limit recognition that displays the current speed limit on the car’s infotainment screen and driver attention alert. It monitors your driving and recommends when you should take a break based on your concentration level. 

Even the illumination gets upgraded with cornering fog lights that light up to correspond with what direction the front wheels are pointing. 

The most important addition, however, is automatic emergency braking that monitors the front of the car and can warn of an imminent collision, slamming on the brakes autonomously if you don’t take action. Unlike a Volkswagen Touran’s system though, which can detect pedestrians and cyclists, Citroen’s automatic brakes only respond to other vehicles. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the Touran comes as standard with active cruise control, which you only get on top-of-the-range Flair Pro versions of the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer. It’s a handy feature which uses radar to keep a safe distance from the car in front, before accelerating back to your predetermined cruising speed when the road clears.

Also included with the top-of-the-range Citroen is active lane departure warning that can gently guide the car in lane if it senses you’re drifting over the white lines. It acts in tandem with a blind spot monitoring system that can detect a car hidden in your blind spot and warns you of its presence. 

Flair Pro cars also add headlights that dip their main beam automatically so they don’t blind other drivers.

Car safety body Euro NCAP has never crash-tested the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer but the smaller C4 SpaceTourer was awarded a five-star rating with NCAP saying it was “satisfied that a similar level of protection is offered by the seven-seat SpaceTourer”.

Finally, a spare wheel doesn’t come as standard but you can have a space saver as a relatively cheap extra. Oh, and 12 months roadside assistance also comes as standard.

The Citroen C4 SpaceTourer scored a disappointing 7.50 out of 10 in the HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Survey, although it is worth bearing in mind that its predecessor, the Citroen Grand C4 Picasso scored a much better 9.24. Owners have reported electrical issues as the main bugbear, so as always we would highly recommend choosing a car with a full dealer service history.

As a brand Citroen performed quite poorly, finishing 25th out of 30 manufacturers in the same survey.

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer’s insurance group ranges from 17 in Touch Edition trim with the basic 1.5-litre diesel engine to group 30 for a top-of-the-range Flair plus model fitted with the 2.0-litre diesel engine. 

Adding the automatic gearbox as an option has only a minor effect on overall insurance costs.

There are substantial savings to be made by choosing the Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer’s rival, the Volkswagen Touran, though. Its insurance groups range from 9 to 21. 

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer’s CO2 emissions range from 136g/km for the 1.5-litre diesel, up to 172g/km (for both the 2.0-litre diesel and 1.2-litre petrol fitted with an automatic gearbox. 

As a result, road tax is £165 for all models, as it falls under the post-April 2017 VED rules.

The Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer comes in three trim levels – Touch Plus, Feel Plus and Flair Plus.

Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer Basic Touch Plus models still look smart because they get 16-inch alloys as standard, as well as roof bars that’ll make it easier to mount a cycle rack or roof box. Stand out features include a seven-inch sat-nav display with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, climate control, cruise control and rear parking sensors.

Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer Feel Plus adds useful features such as keyless entry, a reversing camera and half-leather seats.

Citroen Grand C4 SpaceTourer Flair Plus models come stacked with kit. They add equipment such as an electrically operated rear boot lid, powerful Xenon headlights with auto dip, automatic parking, active cruise control and a huge panoramic glass sunroof. Flair Plus is a popular trim level and, if you’re buying used, you shouldn’t have to pay a huge premium for it. 

It’s also worth noting that a posh full leather interior was an expensive, £2,150 option that shouldn’t carry much of a premium on the used market.