I hope you had a good test drive in traffic as well as on the open road: those semi-automatic gearboxes can be jerky as well as unreliable. In view of this I agree wth you that the warranty could be a good idea, but look carefully at the small print to see what's excluded.

Did a Google search for Customer Protect vehicle warranty - no details came up for a company offering a warranty of this name, although some complaints on forums did. Have you looked at someone like Car Care Plan instead?

I'm going by memory here from delivering hundreds of C4's new.

I'm not certain that petrol engined C4's have automated manual boxes, i'm fairly sure they had a rather nice proper auto box, this is assuming that your choice is petrol...if its a Diesel you are buying then it will be satan's automanual gearbox and quite honestly you couldn't pay me to have one.

As for aftermarket warranties as sold by car dealers...when we bought our current ageing MB nearly 10 years ago, the dealer, a refreshingly straightforward man, told us the used warranty that came with the car wasn't worth the paper it was written on, he assured us that they would wriggle out of paying.

I can't dig out changeover dates but Citroen, like Peugeot and Ford, used to use the Jatco autobox on front-wheel drive cars but changed, like Peugeot and Ford, to use the Aisin autobox.

Jatco rear-wheel drive autoboxes are very good, unlike their front-wheel drive ones.