Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[Skull]

Sorted

[CitroJim]

Excellent news Simon

[white exec]

Result! Well done, you!

[DHallworth]

That's great news, Simon!

I need to find someone with arms like Mr Tickle to change the blue coolant sensor down the back beside the thermostat on mine. The gauge on mine is always reading very low but when putting Lexia on it the other sensors are showing right. The fans etc still kick in but I'm lucky if the gauge shows about 65 degrees very often.

The sensor is now NFP but I managed to find one at a dealer in Belfast, it's been sitting in the door card for the last 2 years!

David.

[CitroJim]

I need to find someone with arms like Mr Tickle to change the blue coolant sensor down the back beside the thermostat on mine.

I've done it, and the TDC sensor too... You need my little girly hands David

They do come in very useful when working on Xantias

[Mandrake]

That's great news, Simon!

I need to find someone with arms like Mr Tickle to change the blue coolant sensor down the back beside the thermostat on mine. The gauge on mine is always reading very low but when putting Lexia on it the other sensors are showing right. The fans etc still kick in but I'm lucky if the gauge shows about 65 degrees very often.

The sensor is now NFP but I managed to find one at a dealer in Belfast, it's been sitting in the door card for the last 2 years!

David.

The Mr Tickle comment had me in stitches David, so apt.

The sensor slightly below the thermostat housing towards the back sticking out towards the LHM tank is actually the brown sensor that controls the fans and warning light not the blue one.

The blue one for the dashboard gauge is on the rear of the rear bank block facing towards the firewall at the LHM end of the block. I've never tried replacing it but I would say the best way to get at it would be to remove the coolant expansion chamber and get a spanner on it down the back of the engine. You can probably get at it without removing the de-gasser.

You'll need to drain quite a bit of coolant if you're taking the expansion chamber out, and I suspect (but don't know for sure) that that blue sensor taps directly into the coolant jacket between two cylinders so coolant would try to leak out from there as well. A good time to do a coolant change!

[elma]

Wheres this Activa for sale? I've just missed 2. I'd like to find one for my friend who needs a car as I know I'll end up with it next if it's an Activa and I'm not really able to restore an Activa and my V6 at the same time.

[Mandrake]

Some might recall DashCam discussion a while back - I actually got a Maisi M30 DashCam for Christmas, this has been running in my car since then. I've been very happy with it, with only a couple of minor niggles. Video resolution is 2304x1296 and quality is excellent, although with a wide 170 degree field of view it does tend to make everything look very far away!

Over that time I've collected a mass of clips of people doing stupid or annoying things and thought it was time to edit them into a video. In fact the clips are building up faster than I have time to edit!

So if listening to an annoyed, slightly whiny sounding Kiwi griping at other drivers stupidity on his daily commute is your cup of tea I have just the thing for you.



I already have enough clips collected to edit a second video, they just keep on rolling in on a near daily basis...I've got some real crackers in the second batch.

[CitroJim]

That's very good quality Simon - I'm pleasantly surprised at how good it is..

I'm keen to get a helmet cam for my bike now...

[Hell Razor5543]

I think the best sound in that clip was the V6 gently burbling away without a care in the world (unlike some of the tiny tinny little engines screaming at the top of their voices to try and get to 40MPH!).

[Mandrake]

That's very good quality Simon - I'm pleasantly surprised at how good it is..

You should see how good the raw video is Jim - Youtube completely mangles the quality of moving video like DashCam's as it transcodes the original video (loosing quality in the process) and uses a bitrate that is too low for lots of movement, so you get lots of blocking. Also the video editor I used itself has to transcode the original videos to the final output, so there are two transcoding steps losing quality... The raw footage is razor sharp.

[Mandrake]

I think the best sound in that clip was the V6 gently burbling away without a care in the world (unlike some of the tiny tinny little engines screaming at the top of their voices to try and get to 40MPH!).

I left the audio in wherever possible (when I wasn't conversing with a passenger, cursing the driver in front of me, or just saying something stupid) mainly to keep the V6 burble in there, the camera does pick it up nicely.

[Mandrake]

I'd like to welcome a new member of the family to my blog.



A 2011 Peugeot Ion fully Electric with 28k miles on the clock. Those reading the Electric cars thread elsewhere will remember me eyeing up a £4200 Ion on autotrader located just 12 miles from me in Glasgow. This is not the exact car that was listed but it's sibling - the dealer had two of them nearly identical, both previously owned by the Inverclyde city council and with license plates that only differed by one letter...

I drove and looked at both cars, both are in good condition with the only differences being a slight difference in mileage (the other one was 23k) the radio code missing on the one I took and that the one I didn't take was missing the RF remote key and thus only had the manual spare key. It turns out a replacement RF key from Peugeot is an eye watering £200 including coding!

I figured that it would be a lot cheaper and easier to get the radio coded than pay £200 for a key. The dealer selling it did his best to get the radio coded for me, even taking it to Peugeot Glasgow, who claimed that they were unable to recover the radio code on an Ion. (!) He knocked £50 off the price due to the missing radio code and recommended somewhere online to try for unlocking.

When I got it home and put it on Diagbox I discovered that I was able to retrieve the radio code and unlock the Radio in about 5 minutes! So I now have a fully working radio too, and its a goodun, with surprisingly good speakers (better than those in my Xantia) a CD slot and Bluetooth support including full hands free mode. So I'm chuffed to get that working by myself without paying for a code or unlocking. (The head unit is a Pioneer by the way)

The car needs a good clean - there's a bit of green on the outside around boot hinges etc from sitting for a bit and the seat backs and headliner have some dirty marks (what do people clean headliner with ? I've never had to clean one before) but other than that the condition is excellent, and everything in the car seems to be working now the radio is coded.

The car still has 2 1/2 years of extended battery warranty (expires June 2019) provided that it goes to the remaining two yearly services this June and the following June.

The car is a lot of fun to drive - sitting in dead silence at the lights then pulling silently away is quite eerie at first but you get used to it very quickly! It weighs 1150Kg and is only 47kW so it's no Xantia V6 in the acceleration department. From stationary up to 20mph the acceleration is very muted and is almost certainly artificially limited to ensure a smooth and wheel spin free takeoff, however from 20mph to 50mph it really takes off and has some real serious poke - not surprising when it has 180N/m for such a small car.

Putting your foot to the floor at 30mph the response is instant and not too far off the V6, at least for the few seconds until you get to about 50mph where it starts to taper off! It can do 80mph but it starts to feel like its running out of steam at 70 - it will get to 70 relatively quickly but there isn't much more available past that. It's certainly not a car you would be doing a lot of overtaking in on the motorway, but it's intended to be a city car.

The ride is predictably hard and bumpy - not uncomfortably so, but I'd say it's typical ride for a small city car with steel springs. Of course it doesn't help that I'm used to a HA2 Xantia, so every steel sprung car I get into including mid sized taxi's feel bumpy to me! It actually reminds me a lot of driving my 1984 Daihatsu Charade Turbo, but without nearly as much cornering grip. (I had oversized tyres on my Charade )

The front wheels are a lot narrower than the rear wheels - presumably because the car is rear wheel drive with quite a bit of torque available they decided to bias the handling towards safer understeer as I could easily see it oversteering with equal sized tyres on the front.

As it is, it has adequate but not outstanding cornering grip, I was able to provoke gentle controlled understeer with it on wet corners despite it being rear wheel drive.

The seating position is very comfortable, and the only thing I could niggle at about the driving experience really is the electric power steering feels a bit indifferent at speed - the car has a tendency to wander slightly to one side or the other and the steering is initially stiff to turn and when it does you then find the car wandering slightly towards the other way, so I found motorway driving required a lot of small corrections on a curve compared to the Xantia where I can hold the wheel steady and it follows the correct curve.

Possibly the steering UJ could do with lubrication, or perhaps the wheel alignment is slightly out, or maybe its just a characteristic of this kind of electric power steering! It wasn't an issue with city speeds.

All in all I'm very happy with it, and got a good vibe from the car right on the first drive home - I do really enjoy driving it, even though it is very different from the Xantia. I enjoy driving both cars, for different reasons!

The running costs of the car are so low that the petrol that I was paying for the Xantia to do 600 miles per month will pay this car off for "free", and I still get to keep both cars! (As long as I don't drive the Xantia too much. )

After enthusing about electric cars for so long I finally have my toe in the water with the smallest, cheapest simplest EV that you can buy, but it's a start.

[Hell Razor5543]

Have fun with it. Looks useful for short journeys.

[Mandrake]

Have fun with it. Looks useful for short journeys.

Range per charge is about 60 miles, which covers 95% of my driving each month, which consists of commuting, shopping, running errands etc. It is rare that I do more than about 40 miles in a single day, with a full charge obtained over night.

For anything where I need a bit more room or a long trip away from home, or just for a bit of fun I still have the Xantia.

It also means that now I have two cars I can always get to work on Monday even if I am tackling a repair over the weekend which I couldn't get completed, which takes a lot of stress and worry off me! I have a few jobs on the Xantia like bottom balljoint which I have been putting off because I was afraid I'd run into complications and not have a car for work on Monday, which would be an extreme inconvenience to say the least when I have a baby to get to his gran's and back...