THE upper-medium sector is the traditional fleet heartland and in the past 12 months it has seen a huge array of new models make their debuts.

As well as the new Ford Mondeo, revised Volkswagen Passat and Renault Laguna II, we also had the arrival of the all-new Citroen C5, the replacement for the angular Xantia.

As well as adopting the new Citroen family face, the C5 has also grown somewhat and it is a very large car for this class, both inside and out.

In estate mode especially, there is a huge amount of space inside (Citroen claims a class-leading 563 litres of load space, which can be extended to 1,658 litres with the rear seats folded down).

A clever feature is an adjustable load height system operated at the touch of a button.

In terms of space, the C5 estate certainly beats its rivals in this class, but how will it fare on the traditional fleet benchmarks such as running costs and residual values?