Hi, I just joined the forum but don't own an XM, however, I have seen one but only one years ago in White Plains NY with PA plates. In the past, many US rules "changed" as Citroen cars were getting ready to be imported and the brand suffered from those sudden changes every time. The XM I believe came after that time but was never intended to be sold in the US.

I used to know the car well while driving pre-series cars for the manufacturer on road and track. I was testing the automatic transmission. These were great cars to me with the hydractive suspention. I remember there were about 40 grey pre-series standard transmission cars at the time I was there at the track and they were all parked waiting to be updated to final configuration. The scene was beautifull in the morning in the woods with fog in the winter. Imagine a quiete place in the middle of nowhere walking in a small forest and all a sudden you get all those nicely parked brand new cars very, very few people have ever seen. That's a great memory. You get to see a lot of wierd stuff in those places too. Back to topic, after driving some of the very early automatic models before they were even sold, it was a very very strange scene for me to see one of those very few imported models in the US. The most common Citroens I see in the US are DS and I've seen 2CV's near Atlanta as well where I believe the is a 2cv club


If I recall, the XM was tested in Germany on highway for high speed test with a CX body attached to it for camouflage.

Believe what killed them in goold 'ole US was the minimum road-clearance/ride-height requirement, which Cit's failed on when they were parked and sat down.

Same goes for lowering a standard car.

From what I recall, there'd been some incidents of cars grounding and losing control, so rather than fix the road to proper standards, make the car manufacturer sort it. That's the great thing about a litigation-driven society, a couple deaths and they just want to sue someone rather than look at the real problem

Dave