Wrythe Lane queues and Carshalton's hills: what they do to a Citroën
Anyone who drives past St Helier Hospital at visiting time knows how Wrythe Lane moves: a few yards, a bus pulling out, an ambulance coming through, then another stop. In a C3 or C4 Picasso with the EGS or ETG automated manual gearbox, every one of those crawls is a clutch engagement managed by an actuator. That is where jerky pull-aways, hesitation and the odd drop into neutral tend to start, usually from clutch wear or an actuator that is losing its calibration.
We diagnose these gearboxes properly before replacing anything. That means reading the gearbox control unit, checking the clutch wear values it stores and testing the actuator. Sometimes a clutch relearn is all it needs. Where the clutch is worn, it is replaced and the relearn carried out so the new clutch engages smoothly, which a lot of first-time repairs miss. We road test before and after, including a hill start on Park Hill, so you can feel the difference yourself rather than taking our word for it.
Climbing from Carshalton Village up towards Carshalton Park and Oaks Park puts a different system to work. First-generation C4 Picasso and Grand C4 Picasso models are known for parking brake motor and control unit faults, and a car parked on a slope with a parking brake faulty message is not somewhere you want to leave it. We test the motor unit, cables and control unit, and on Ruskin Road or Carshalton Park Road that often means a car that has been holding on a camber for years.
Everything is priced in writing before work begins, and repairs carry a 3-month workmanship warranty. Carshalton is only 1.2 miles from Soho Mills, so dropping the car in on the way to Hackbridge station is easy, or we can arrange collection if the gearbox will not select a gear. We are open on Saturdays too, which helps if the car is needed for the school run or work during the week.

