Citroen C5 Aircross Review 2026: Price, specs & boot space

If you're after a family-friendly SUV and prioritise comfort highly, it might well be. To get something with a cushier ride, you'll need to spend a whole lot more on a premium SUV with fancy air suspension. It also scores well for anyone looking for a value proposition, with very reasonable new pricing. It's a bit early for used bargains, though.

It's hard to say whether you'd be better off with the C5 Aircross or the all-electric e-C5 Aircross. It'll depend on home charging possibilities, the kind of car you're driving, and also if you're looking to get one through the company car scheme. We do think it makes more sense as an e-C5 Aircross, though, with the smooth electric powertrain going well with the car's relaxed attitude. 

Should you go down the EV route, we reckon you're best off sticking with the Comfort Range car unless you think you'll make use of the Extended Range car's extra endurance very often. 

For C5 Aircross customers, the Hybrid is the clear winner. As a three-cylinder engine, it's not especially refined, but the plug-in hybrid is of limited appeal given that it's charged at a big premium, is only available on the top trim grade, and has a high company car tax rate. 

In terms of trim levels, the mid-spec Plus offers a good upgrade in equipment over the entry-level You! for a reasonable premium, and would be our pick.

Most similar of all are the Peugeot 3008, Vauxhall Grandland and the Jeep Compass, because they sit on the same platform and use a lot of the same components as the C5 Aircross. All the brands involved are part of the massive Stellantis car manufacturing giant, but don't go thinking these are simply rebadges – the cars are surprisingly different in terms of interior and exterior styling, as well as character.

The C5 Aircross has plenty to worry about further away from home, too. There's the Skoda Karoq, which is getting on a bit now, but remains a very strong choice. The Kia Sportage and Hyundai Tucson also do the platform/component sharing thing, and are both great alternatives. 

If that wasn't enough, there's also the Nissan Qashqai, Mazda CX-5 and Volkswagen Tiguan all trying to grab a slice of that same family SUV pie. 

While the Stellantis alternatives all have electric variants to counter the e-C5 Aircross, many other manufacturers have dedicated EV models acting as rivals. These include the Skoda Enyaq, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Volkswagen ID.4.

Gone are the days when Citroens used to be bargain basement inside. The C5 Aircross feels quite premium in places, especially if you prod those fabric surfaces, which have a soft under-layer. It's a nice touch (quite literally). Meanwhile, that awful, scratch-prone piano black stuff manufacturers seem to love is kept to a relative minimum. 

Look a little further down from the fabric stuff, and you'll see some cheaper, harder plastics on the dashboard, and the same can be said of the door cards. You won't be looking down there all that often, though, and more importantly, everything seems to be put together well.

Interestingly, while both the Peugeot 3008 and Vauxhall Grandland go for landscape, widescreen arrangements, the C5 Aircross adopts a portrait infotainment system that sits on what it calls a 'waterfall', although we'd rather describe it as a 'plinth'. It's a bit like what you get in a lot of modern Mercedes-Benz models. 

This, we reckon, puts everything in easier reach than a widescreen, landscape display placed high up in the dashboard does. It makes more sense for the map view, as well, letting you see further in front of the car than you otherwise might. 

On that front, the in-built navigation works well enough, but as ever, we'd rather use something like Google Maps or Waze, which is nice and simple thanks to the presence of wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Keeping devices charged is also easy, with a wireless charging pad included, plus backlit USB-C ports (a pair in the front and a pair in the rear) and three 12-volt sockets (front, rear and boot).

The responsiveness of the screen is fine, but the system seems to like having a good think about certain functions before they load up. The menu system is perfectly logical, and you'll likely get your head where most things are after the first drive or two. 

There are no fancy-pants sound system options in the configurator, but that's just fine, as the standard, six-speaker setup surpassed our expectations. It delivers a punchy amount of bass and a general sense of clarity even when you crank the volume up.

The C5 Aircross is longer than before, helping unlock a 51mm increase in rear legroom, which is noticeably generous when you're sat back there. The same can be said of the rear headroom, which has gone up by 68mm, and we like that you can tilt the rear seatback from 21 to 33 degrees on Plus and Max models. Front-seat occupants get all sorts of adjustments, so why shouldn't whoever's in the back get to join the fun? Oh, and there's also a near-flat floor, which should stop any middle-seat passengers complaining. 

Despite growing in size, though, the boot is a bit smaller than before at 565 litres. The old one offered anything from 585 to 720 litres if you pushed the sliding rear seat all the way forward, something you can't do in the new car. In any case, 565 litres is more than you get in a Nissan Qashqai, and we won't grumble at the 1,668 litres of space available once the rear bench is folded. 

You also get 40 litres of storage away from the boot, including a sizeable (and also cooled) cubby under the central armrest, and a big glovebox Citroen says can accommodate a 1.5-litre bottle. 

The boot itself is good for 565 litres, which is on par with rivals, with the similarly sized Skoda Enyaq doing only slightly better at 585 litres. The old C5 Aircross has a bigger boot at 580 litres, which can expand to as much as 720 litres with the rear bench slid forward, something you can't do on the new one.

There isn't much to the engine line-up, consisting only of a 1.2-litre three-cylinder 'Hybrid' pushing out 145PS and 230Nm of torque, or a plug-in hybrid combining a 1.6-litre four-cylinder with a 17.8kWh battery pack and an electric motor for a healthier 195PS and 300Nm. There's no longer a diesel in the line-up.

The inverted commas used earlier are there because calling it a hybrid, as Citroen does, feels a touch misleading, because it's more of a mild-hybrid system with a tiny battery rather than a self-charging hybrid with a chunkier one. Electric-only running is very limited, with its main purpose being an extension of the stop-start feature's operation. 

It's not a very refined engine, and feels underpowered for a car the size and weight of the C5 Aircross, as shown with its 11.2-second 0-62mph time. To get there in that time, the three-cylinder engine makes a big, noisy deal out of it, and the shifts from its six-speed automatic gearbox aren't the snappiest. 

The four-cylinder in the plug-in hybrid is more refined and a lot punchier. Even with the weight of its big battery pack to carry around, the PHEV manages 0-62mph in a much more respectable 8.3 seconds. Should you call upon all its performance, it can still be a bit noisy at higher revs, but it's a lot smoother on the whole. The seven-speed gearbox is slicker than the six, too, and the hybrid setup is smooth whenever the engine comes back to life after the car's been running on electricity alone. 

The e-C5 Aircross will initially only be available with a 73.7kWh 'Comfort Range' battery, paired with a 210PS motor, although a much larger 'Extended Range' pack will later join the range with a 230PS motor. A 0-62mph time of 8.9 seconds doesn't sound thrilling, and indeed, the e-C5 Aircross never feels fast. It has just about enough performance to feel effortless, though, and ditching engine noise feels the right way to go in a car with such a relaxed demeanour. 

The e-C5 Aircross Comfort Range is capable of covering up to 320 miles on a full charge. At least, that's according to the official WLTP combined cycle figure. These are notoriously difficult to replicate in real-world driving, so you'll be doing well to get 300 even at warmer times of year and with a bias towards urban driving. You'll get a lot less during colder months, especially if you're doing a lot of motorway miles.

If you want to go further on a full charge, you'll want the Extended Range version, due to join the line-up at a later date. It has a projected range of 420 miles, but again, don't bank on actually getting as much as that. 

For the sake of comparison, a Skoda Enyaq manages 268 to 359 miles depending on the model you pick.

It'd be no good to make a smooth-riding car that then makes a blustery racket when cruising on a motorway, but thankfully, the C5 Aircross keeps wind and road noise down to perfectly acceptable levels. As mentioned, the engines aren't the quietest when worked hard, but generally, they will fade into the background once you're up to speed. 

The C5 Aircross has a Euro NCAP score of four stars, although not from testing it specifically. Instead, the car's results are carried over from the Peugeot 3008, which is considered a 'corporate twin' with the same structure and safety systems. 

That's not a bad score, but it's underwhelming when rival cars, including the Kia Sportage, came away with the full five-star rating. We reckon a large part of the reason it missed out on that final star was due to the performance of its safety assistance systems, which were scored at only 62%.

On the subject of safety systems, all versions of the car have a driver attention monitor, lane departure warning, extended traffic sign and speed limit information and autonomous emergency braking as standard. 

As a new car sitting on a relatively fresh platform, it's hard to say how the C5 Aircross will shape up in terms of reliability. What we do know is that the brand doesn't tend to cover itself in glory in the HonestJohn.co.uk Satisfaction Index, our go-to source for reliability data. 

In the most recent running, it placed 25th out of 33 manufacturers for reliability, with nearly 17% of surveyed owners having experienced an issue. Citroen did at least place higher than all of its fellow Stellantis brands, with Vauxhall, Jeep and Alfa Romeo occupying the bottom three spots. 

The warranty is nothing special, lasting 60,000 miles and three years, although there's unlimited mileage coverage in the first two years, in the unlikely event you manage to breach the 60k limit in that period and get an issue. The high-voltage batteries in the plug-in hybrid and the e-C5 Aircross models have a separate warranty lasting 100,000 miles and years, kicking in if the battery health drops below 70%.

For the C5 Aircross, insurance groups range from 18 to 20 for the Hybrid (depending on trim level), while the plug-in hybrid and the e-C5 Aircross Comfort range are both in group 29.

The VED vehicle tax exemption for EVs disappeared in April 2025, as did the token £10 discount for 'alternatively fuelled vehicles', so it's the same annual rate of £195 from year two for all versions of the C5/e-C5 Aircross. 

EVs are also liable for the government's premium car tax supplement of £425 annually from years two to six of the vehicle's life. The top spec versions of the e-C5 Aircross and C5 Aircross plug-in hybrid are in danger of being pushed over the £40,000 threshold once a few options are added.

Both the C5 Aircross and e-C5 Aircross are available in You!, Plus and Max trim levels. The equipment levels are near enough the same, with the main difference being the e-C5 Aircross getting bigger wheels as standard. 

The You! is a good starting point, coming with 18-inch alloy wheels (19-inch wheels on the e-C5 Aircross), automatic LED headlights, electrically adjustable and heated door mirrors, a 10-inch digital instrument cluster, 13-inch infotainment system, wireless phone charging pad, adaptive cruise control, keyless entry/start, rear parking sensors and dual-zone climate control as standard.

tUpgrade to Plus, and you'll get all of the above plus 19-inch wheels (unless you're getting an eC5 Aircross, which will already have them), tinted rear windows, the reclining seat backrest, interior ambient lighting, front parking sensors and a rear parking camera. Finally, Max builds on this with a driver's seat lumbar adjustment, matrix LED headlights, artificial leather trim and a 360-degree parking camera.