Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[Mandrake]

The car deserves a Blue Plaque, Simon.
He must have been someone who appreciated something a bit special when it came to personal transport.

From what I was told by the son who handled the sale, he bought it new in 1997 and was still driving it up until he was 92 in 2013 - eg the year before I bought it.

I feel a bit guilty that I haven't been able to look after it as well as it deserved.

While it's still basically sound it now has some rust paint bubbles above two of the wheel arches, is missing the plastic back of the passenger wing mirror, (don't know what happened to that! I think a cyclist hit it while it was parked one day) needs a new exhaust, timing belt is well over due, (in years but not miles) needs new rear discs etc etc... and I never did get around to having the paint work and bumper scrapes that came with the car that nearly made me not buy it repaired.

The truth is I can't afford to do "elective" work on it any more and my case for spending money on the car is significantly reduced now that the Ion does most of the driving, and in particular because it is going to be regulated off the roads where I live by the end of 2022 due to the new low emissions zones. By then it will be 24 years old so will have had a good run. (It has still only done 82k miles! The gearbox while not perfect, is pretty sound by 4HP20 standards)

So if it's still on the road by 2022 (which I think it will be) it will be up for sale! I'll be sure to give forum members first dibs of course as I'd like to see it go to a good home. It still drives really nicely and it has been a reliable car so I'll be sad to see it go, but the LEV zones that are coming into effect have really put the final nail in the coffin for my ownership of the car.

And yes, as someone who is fairly pro-EV the irony of this is not lost on me!

[Skull]

Yeah Simon buy something that will help save the planet

Looking at the pictures of the rash on the underbody I'm surprised it has fared so well going off your description I was expecting much worse. I'd still be inclined to pursue the council given the evidence you have and presumably a damage report from the garage.

[Mandrake]

Sorry to leave you all hanging... I picked the car up on Monday night.

It passed the MOT without problems and the work seems to have been done well. I was given a full print out of the wheel alignment. From memory this car requires 0-6mm total toe in, or zero to 0'18 degrees toe in per side, and they have set it to about 0'15. Steering feels totally different compared to even before the accident let alone after!

Ever since I've had the car it has been a bit of a "wanderer" on the motorway that needs frequent corrections to stay in the middle of the lane, especially in strong cross winds where it gets blown all over the place. Likewise on bumpy 60mph A roads you'd need to steer it back on course to stay in the lane, unlike the Xantia that just goes straight ahead oblivious to any road disturbances...

As a few other Ion/C-Zero owners have reported similar wander characteristics at high speed and also the same "sticky" power steering feel at speed I had put it down to just a not very good suspension/steering design compared to the Xantia. However the straight line stability is now transformed and is far better than it was when I first bought the car. You can actually hold the wheel still on a fast bumpy A road and it goes perfectly straight ahead without any wander at all. Result!

The steering wheel was slightly offset before I hit the traffic island the other week, this impact just offset it even more. So I think the car may have run over something like a bad pothole on the left wheel either before I got it or soon after and bent the suspension and/or wheel alignment slightly. When I took it in to them there was quite significant wear on the left hand edge of the left front tyre, but no unusual wear on the right hand front tyre - and as it was not driven far between accident and repair I can't believe the amount of wear I see happened in one day.

Either I drive too fast around roundabouts or the wheel alignment has been wrong for a while! Anyway steering is centred and straight line stability is excellent now.

I did have an odd situation on the way home after I picked the car up though, which is why I delayed posting to say everything was fine. The traction control went bananas no less than 3 times on the 2 mile journey home. Basically while accelerating gently on a slight left hand bend it would suddenly start flashing the traction control light and pumping the rear left brake for several seconds in an attempt to prevent wheel spin that wasn't actually occurring.

This was of course disconcerting and my mind immediately jumped to the possibility of a damaged front left wheel speed sensor cable either during the incident or during the repair work. So when I got it home I had a poke around in the wheel arch but the cable for the sensor looked fine, and the connector isn't accessible without removing the plastic shield in the guard. I also checked and equalised the tyre pressures as the car is very sensitive to rolling radius imbalances.

I then took it for a longish test drive and I could not reproduce the problem, and indeed it's now 3 days of commuting later and not a single occurrence of the issue! So what happened ?

One possibility is that the rear left tyre has been replaced twice now for punctures, as a result it has about 2mm more tread on it than the rear right tyre, and at the time I was concerned that the imbalance may cause false traction control activation, but at least at the time it didn't seem to be enough of an imbalance to cause an issue.

Prior to that when I had fitted new tyres on the rear and still had old worn tyres on the front (and a particularly worn one on the front left) the traction control was falsely activating on gentle left bends with gentle acceleration - exactly as it did on Monday... that problem continued to happen intermittently until the front tyres were replaced and then went away.

So it's possible that the radius imbalance between left and right rear tyres is right near the limit causing it to be prone to triggering. Another possibility is that correcting such a large tracking and steering wheel offset may have resulted in the ESP ECU initially being confused by the new straight ahead position of the steering wheel, thinking that the car is now turning when it's going straight.

The ESP ECU reports the steering wheel angle so before I took it on that test drive I checked to see if there were any ABS/ESP related fault codes (there weren't) and also checked the reported steering wheel angle and calibration status. It was almost completely bang on and said "calibrated", however this was after the journey home where I had the problems and after the car had been turned off and back on.

I don't know how long the steering wheel sensor takes to calibrate to a change in wheel alignment but I assume it works very similarly to the Hydractive 2 steering wheel sensor on the Xantia where it uses heuristics to figure out where the straight ahead position is based on where the wheel is most frequently held still during driving.

In that case it may have taken the entire 2 mile drive home after the repair work for the steering wheel sensor to re-calibrate its straight ahead position, and until that calibration was finished it may have suffered false traction control activations based on the wheel speed readings not matching up with the assumed steering wheel angle.

I think the steering wheel sensor re-calibrating itself is the most likely scenario - the steering wheel offset after the accident was a lot - I'd say about 15 degrees! Anyway, fingers crossed that the traction control gremlins don't come back.

[white exec]

As an old teacher of mine once jokingly claimed, when using a weighted plumb-line, for best accuracy you should allow the Earth to rotate twice before reading it. In your case, probably need to circumnavigate the globe twice, preferably as close to the N or S Pole as possible.

Glad the repair was successful, especially the improved handling. You wonder how it left the factory...if other owners have had the same.

[Mandrake]

Is anyone familiar with the alarm system on the S1 Xantia ?

I came home yesterday to find the LED in the middle of the cabin temperature sensor vent flashing very rapidly and intently as if it was trying to warn me that the alarm had been set off in my absence, except..... I don't set the alarm when the car is parked at home. (As I don't want to deadlock it when it sometimes sits for long enough for the battery to go flat)

So anyone know what a constant very rapid flash means ? Locking and setting the deadlocks/alarm and unlocking again did not stop it flashing, which is the normal way to cancel the alarm if it has triggered. (The siren doesn't work so I can only tell by the flashing headlights that it's going off!)

I actually had to start the motor and stop it to stop the frantic flashing of the light. Have never seen this before...

[RichardW]

Doesn't the alarm set automatically when you lock the car on the first button? The second button only sets the deadlocking. As I remember rapid flash = alarm activated, can't remember if it normally goes out at key on... it is >10 years since I had a MK1!!

[white exec]

Mk1 Xantia might be close enough to '96 XM to have the same alarm system fitted, although Cit did fit more than one system in earlier years. Your deadlocking and alarm set procedure sounds the same as ours.

In case of misbehavior (or if battery is disconnected (flat?)), there is an alarm reset procedure...

With all doors closed
- disconnect battery for c30secs
- reconnect battery
- immediately Lock the doors with the remote* (don't deadlock)
- press again to Unlock
Alarm is then reset.

* For some odd reason, for this procedure only, I always need to press the Lock button on the remote twice to lock. First press just gives a small click of the locking motors, second press locks properly. Just make sure door buttons actually go down, before Unlocking.

[xantia_v6]

The Mk1 Xantia alarm is only set with the deadlocking button. The alarm on mine does not work (I think it has been somehow disconnected), and I don't use the deadlocking.

[Mandrake]

Correct. On Mk1 the alarm is only armed when the deadlocking button is pressed. Because the car doesn't get driven much and has run the battery down on more than one occasion I'm not willing to chance deadlocking the car as if the battery went completely flat it would be a smash job to get in!

In the 4 years I've had the car I've never seen this rapid flash before, and certainly not when the alarm has not been set.

[van ordinaire]

I've learned to ignore these randomly flashing red lights, as I've never had any idea what they mean but do know they serve no useful purpose.

[white exec]

On XM, although the alarm is only activated when the car is deadlocked, the ALARM RESET procedure - to be used after a loss of battery supply (flat battery or battery disconnection) - is achieved as described above. I was just thinking that Mk1 Xantia could be the same.

I've had rapid LED flashing on a few occasions (which can indicate an alarm fault, as well as a triggering), and this has always been successfully cleared with the Reset procedure.

Alarm triggering can also arise from the volumetric (movement) senors in the cabin. I routinely disarm those with the dash switch when deadlock-parking. Presume Xantia has similar.

[Mandrake]

Looks like my run of bad luck continues!

Despite just passing its MOT I happened to catch a glance of the inside tread of the right rear tyre and it looked completely bald!

Jacked it up to have a closer look and discovered something very odd indeed - it's almost bald on the inside edge over about 1/3rd of the rotation but OK on the rest!

The two pictures below are the same tyre just rotated 180 degrees:

Wow, never seen anything like this in 25 years of driving... The tyre has done about 20k miles and the tread depth measurements are:

Outside tread block - about 4.1mm all the way around the circumference.
Centre groove - about 5mm all the way around.
Inside tread block - varying between 0.97mm where it looks bald to 3.2mm where it looks OK. The bald bits also show cracking.

By comparison the other rear tyre which was replaced recently due to a puncture and has probably only done <5k miles is:

Outside tread block - 6.53mm
Centre groove - 7.76mm
Inside tread block - 6.36mm.

And is even all the way around as it should be and has no abnormal wear signs.

Ever since these tyres were fitted the balance has never seemed right and I took it back to be re-balanced 3 times, despite that under full acceleration from 30-50mph there is a distinct vibration from the rear which goes away when lifting off the throttle. Keeping in mind it's RWD so additional weight is thrown onto the rear driving wheels when accelerating.

I was about to chalk it up to a defective tyre when I noticed the rim is bent on the inside edge:



Given that the vibration has been there ever since I've had the car and 3mm of abnormal tread wear doesn't happen over night the rim must have been bent either before I got the car or not long after! Strangely the bend in the rim is about 30 degrees rotation from where the tyre is worn but I'm sure there's some scientific reason for that...

So it looks like I need to track down a new wheel rim, and while the i-Miev rims will fit they're a totally different style of alloy that won't match so it needs to be an Ion/C-Zero rim, and they have different badges in the middle, so I'd need to check if the badge in the middle is removable if it was a C-Zero rim.

And of course it will need a new tyre. It's perfectly driveable at the moment so it's not urgent however I think I'd like to get a replacement rim and new tyre before next winter as the inner tread is the winter side of the tread pattern and there is not much of that left now!

I jacked up and checked the other three wheels around their full rotation - both the inner and outer edge of the alloys and the tread of the tyres and they're all fine so it's only the one wheel that has an issue.

[Skull]

Simon I presume the rears are the regenerative brakes, so could be the bent wheel rim is concentrating the forces braking and acceleration + cornering excessively in that spot - just a theory

[Mandrake]

Yes the rear wheels do both acceleration and regenerative braking as it's RWD. The regenerative braking is not particularly strong though - maybe 0.2G maximum, the rest is done with friction brakes.

[white exec]

It's possible to have a wheel/tyre perfectly balanced but geometrically non-circular, which will produce a smaller or larger amount of vibration. Years ago I rejected a couple of brand new Avon tyres which were non-circular, and where no amount of balancing would rid the car of vibration. Am now in the habit of taking a peek at the lower circumference of the tyre (under the cowling on the balancer machine) to check that there is no run-out.

That uneven wear of yours really is grim.