France is a vast country and if you've ever driven a significant distance across it, you'll be familiar with its pristine network of Autoroute toll roads. These motorways couldn't be more different from our own where the expansion joints shake your fillings out and it often seems as though your entire journey takes place during the first frantic seconds of an F1 Grand Prix. In France, long distance driving is a relaxed, dignified affair, with mile after mile of smooth tarmac and, if you avoid the cities, a refreshing lack of other road users. French cars tend to reflect this.

We've been running a 1.6-litre HDi Citroen C4 for a good two months now. The car's well-equipped and features Citroen's clever EGS or Electronic Gearbox System which affords the driver a choice of automatic or clutch-less manual gear changes. It's softly-sprung and compliant on the road, with its interior remaining pleasantly free from noise and vibration. In short, the C4 has revealed itself to be an accomplished mile-muncher in the best Galic traditions.

All too often, a decent car's prospects are scuppered by an early press reception that picks holes in its performance and ridicules its handling package. It's easy for the gimlet-eyed roadtester with his racing boots, speed camera detector and encyclopaedic knowledge of challenging B-roads to lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of car UK buyers are quite content to leave sideways cornering antics to the professionals. Cars like Vauxhall's Vectra, Peugeot's 607, Citroen's C5 have all suffered in this way but all, like our Citroen C4, are in their element when confronted with a long motorway trip.

The C4 hatch is no dullard in the handling department: it's just not quite as sharp in feel as family hatch rivals like the Ford Focus and Volkswagen Golf. If you're the kind of motorist who routinely covers big mileages, the chances are you'll gladly sacrifice some cornering poise for the comfort-orientated set-up that Citroen have bestowed upon this five-door offering. Indeed, this bias designed to ensure its occupants arrive at the end of a long trip feeling fresh makes the C4 a clever choice for the business user. Today's company car taxation system ensures that fleet vehicles are only really financially viable for employees who cover significant annual mileages and our C4 HDi seems ideally suited to precisely that purpose.

"The C4 has revealed itself to be an accomplished mile-muncher"

The temptation is there to turn your nose up at a 1.6-litre diesel engine in a family hatchback, writing it off as lacking the gumption to properly keep up with traffic, but Citroen's 110bhp 1.6HDi is well equipped to challenge such preconceptions. It'll get the C4 hatch to 60mph in 11.2 seconds and there's a 119mph top speed but the real crux of this engine is the 177lb/ft of torque that's produced low down in the rev range delivering muscular in-gear shove and plenty of scope for overtaking. Equally important to business users will be the exemplary 120g/km CO2 emissions which are achieved with the aid of Citroen's DPF diesel particulate filter.

Citroen claim that the EGS transmission fitted to our model achieves fuel savings of 6% over a manual C4 with the same engine: this translates into an excellent combined fuel economy figure of 63mpg. Even over the course of our test, the C4 has routinely breached the 55mpg barrier. Gone are the days when specifying a self-shifting gearbox meant paying a sizable penalty at the pumps.

The French manufacturer confidently wheels out the oft repeated claim that their set-up combines "the convenience of an automatic with the driver involvement of a manual" and, to be fair, it has a fairly good go. There's no clutch pedal or manual shift lever, at least not in the traditional sense. The cogs are swapped electronically by a computer and a robotised clutch but some element of driver control is maintained through the steering wheel-mounted paddle shifters and a gearstick that, when flicked back and forth, also lets you hop up and down sequentially between the ratios. There will be many times when you just can't be bothered with all this though and the EGS has a fully automatic mode, which replicates the smooth shifts of a traditional automatic, for just such an occasion.

When you do feel like pressing on, the 'S' button next to the gearlever puts the EGS into sport mode, a setting where the gearchanges are quickened up by a few important fractions of a second to create a livelier feel behind the wheel. Another clever component of the system is the hill-start assist function that prevents the car from rolling away when you're trying to pull away up or down a gradient - a common problem with self-shifters of old. The system engages automatically when a gradient of 3% or more is detected; it then acts to hold the car stationary for two seconds after the brake is released, giving the driver time to get on the throttle.

First impressions on climbing aboard the C4 are that 'this is going to take a bit of getting used to'. The steering wheel's hub doesn't turn with the wheel itself. It stays fixed in position as you round corners, the digital rev counter and the warning lights situated on a console above it. Any other information you might require is then available from a clear centrally mounted multi-function display on the top of the dash. It's all a bit unusual but, remarkably, after a few minutes on the road, you really don't feel that anything's amiss. Citroen deserve credit for the innovation contained within the C4's interior, even if some of the plastics don't feel as solid as in the family hatch class leaders.

Citroen have a history of producing cars that thrive on long motorway journeys and we've been on more than a few in our C4 test vehicle. It has all the attributes to shrink these extended distances, making the most arduous trip something more than bearable. The French definitely have a talent for cars like this but then they've got the roads to drive them on. If our thoroughfares were similarly well maintained, perhaps we'd all be driving Citroens.