Cross-Channel Firing

A better company car was probably low on the list of reasons for taking the top jobs that Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown each ascended to this year, but the limos our leaders are seen in are of huge significance. The heads of non-car-producing states mostly choose a black, armoured Mercedes S-class, for years the choice of paranoid despots worldwide. North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il is reported to have over 20, and previous freedom-hating fans of the S-class or its forebears have included Chairman Mao, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, and Idi Amin, cannibal and former ruler of Uganda. An endorsement to die for – literally.

If you lead a country that makes cars, however, you have to choose a vehicle made by the home team. In Europe, this is great news for the Italians; the president and prime minister each get a sexy Maserati Quattroporte with a Ferrari-made V8 engine. It’s rather less so for the Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, who gets saddled with a staid Volvo S80.

In France, de Gaulle had the incomparably stylish Citroën DS, and Pompidou ordered a bespoke, open, four-door version of Citroën’s glamorous 1970s SM coupe, powered by a Maserati engine. Dubbed the Opera, the latter is probably the coolest presidential limo in history. The Elysee Palace still has a couple of them, but they are not considered sufficiently reliable or secure for regular use in these troubled times. Instead, successive French presidents have suffered from their domestic car industry’s appalling loss of form in large saloons, enduring the anonymous Peugeot 607 and the gawky Renault Avantime.

Citroën has saved Sarkozy from shame at the next G8 meeting, however. Its new C6 luxury saloon is unmistakably French, with avant-garde styling and innovative engineering, and unlike its predecessors it deserves direct comparison with cars from the best European premium marques – cars such as the Jaguar XJ diesel, now offered to UK cabinet ministers alongside the Toyota Prius hybrid. For years the famously prudent Gordon Brown set an example by refusing to change his obsolete and rather worn-looking Vauxhall Omega, but now he has been forced to graduate to the prime ministerial XJ. His version is armoured, airtight to protect against gas attack and costs €270,000, but no matter; the leaders of Britain and France now get driven in comparable cars. So who gets more bragging rights in the post-summit bar at Davos or Gleneagles? And which of the two should you choose?

We should immediately acknowledge the difference in price between the two; with diesel engines the C6 costs between €48,000 and €57,000 depending on specification and market, and the XJ between €67,000 and €75,000. The C6 is a direct price rival for Jaguar’s new, smaller XF sports saloon, which replaces the S-Type.

The XJ’s styling is a modern pastiche of the seminal 1968 XJ; it clearly communicates that this is a pricey, premium car, but despite a recent facelift its looks are stuffy and staid and now the single biggest factor limiting the XJ’s sales. The C6 won’t appeal to all tastes, but given its limited volume aspirations, it doesn’t have to.

It has forms and proportions you won’t see anywhere else, and regardless of what you think of the result, boldness and originality in car design deserve encouragement.

Sadly, the C6’s freshness doesn’t continue inside; the seats and hemispherical drop-down door bins look interesting, but this isn’t the oddball, original Citroën cabin of old. The Jag doesn’t exactly shine here either; its retro cabin suffers as badly as the exterior when compared with the modernism of an Audi A8, for example.

The C6 and XJ have trump cards, however; the C6 offers gadgets, including a lane-departure warning system that vibrates your seats if it thinks you’re inadvertently drifting and a head-up display that projects road speed and other data onto the windscreen. The Jag offers quality; it feels like a car two classes above the C6, rather than one. Unsurprisingly, the 20 cm-longer Jaguar offers our politicos better legroom in the rear, though they’re likely to have the taxpayers hand over another €2,600 for the long-wheelbase version, which adds another 125 mm to the rear cabin.

Despite its extra size, the Jaguar’s aluminium construction (the C6 is largely steel) makes it almost 200 kg lighter than the Citroën. On the road, the C6 is impressive, delivering the flexible, relaxed but potent performance we expect from a high-specification modern diesel. The Jaguar feels as if it has two extra cylinders, however; it claims to be over a second faster to 100 kph at 7.8 seconds to the Citroën’s 8.9, but the difference feels more marked when you’re in the driving seat. You’d need to trade up to the supercharged R at €90,000 to get an XJ that feels significantly quicker.

Having consciously distanced itself from its edgy German rivals and with its long line of floaty forebears, the C6 has to ride well – and it does. Those unused to this very idiosyncratic, French approach to suspension might find it disconcerting; the hydraulic, active suspension isolates you better from the road than most cars this side of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, but added to steering that’s light and lacking in feel, you’re left feeling slightly disconnected. The XJ rides on air springs that smooth away road roughness almost as well but leave a sense of the surface beneath, imparting greater confidence. The C6 doesn’t like to be hustled – that’s not what it was built to do – but the Jaguar manages to both ride and handle. It’s an engaging car to drive quickly; its great tragedy is that it is so much better to drive than those frumpy looks suggest.

So, the votes are in: Brown beats Sarkozy, but not by the majority that the price or previous performance of their respective rides would suggest.