Cars I've owned and still own

I don't think I would ever have believed that I would own two French cars at the same time. But that's what happened back in 2015 when I bought my Citroën C4, and I still have and drive them both. You might have the idea that Citroën only makes or made the 2CV, but the company makes a full range of automobiles of different sizes. In the picture below, the C4 is the grayish-colored car. The car behind it is my pale blue Peugeot 206, which I bought when we first came to live here in 2003.

As for the Citroën [see-tro-'ehn], I was planning to take it in for service about now. The last time it was serviced was a year ago. At the time, its odometer read 100,400 kilometers. Right now, the odometer shows 102,400. That means we've driven it two thousand kilometers (1,200 miles) in 12 months — an average of 100 miles a month. In fact, I've only put 12,000 miles (20,000 kilometres) since I bought it seven years ago. At the end of my career in the SF Bay area, I was driving 100 miles a day just to get to work and back from our house in San Francisco to my job in Silicon Valley.

Above is a picture of my Peugeot 206 that I took this morning. To me it still looks and drives like a new car. I think it's the best car I've ever owned, and certainly the one I've owned the longest (19 years). It has nearly 200,0000 kilometers (120,000 miles) on it. It's almost 22 years old. I put as many kilometers on the Peugeot annually as I put on the Citroën. With fuel prices what they are right now, it's just as well.

Over the course of my life I've owned five new cars: a 1973 Opel, a 1984 Subaru, a 1990 VW Jetta, and two VW Passats (1993 and 1996 models). I've also owned a used 1966 Ford Fairlane and a used 1973 Renault 4L. Only the 1990 Jetta (and possibly the 1973 Renault) was more fun to drive than the Peugeot, which still looks like a new car. Just above is a photo of the other French car I've owned, a Renault 4 that looks like the one I had in Paris in 1981-82. The much larger and more comfortable 2007 Citroën C4 is almost 15 years old already, but you'd never know it. I bought the Peugeot and Citroën, both used, here in Saint-Aignan.