Wow! How reliable?

[sinky]

Hello. Iv just received a secondhand Xm Haynes service manual via e-bay
Cost me £3 free postage.Bargain

Now the strange bit. No oily fingerprints or brew stains on the cover
Are Xm's really that reliable?

Paul

[xantia_v6]

No, but they are that rare... There are more Haynes manuals than XMs.

[Dean]

Na, its just the XM would break down so much, by the time the Haynes manual had travelled through the post you had already re built the whole car twice and so gained more knowledge than any manual could give you rendering it useless and unused.

D

[Peter.N.]

My experience is that they can be unreliable when you first get them until you have sorted all the problems out, from then on they are usually extremely reliable.

Peter

[sinky]

The car is great peter.

It just that iv never ever had a Haynes without brew stains and oily fingerprints

[Dieselman]

My experience is that they can be unreliable when you first get them until you have sorted all the problems out, from then on they are usually extremely reliable.

Peter

I would agree with that. I had two XM from new. The first one was a very early car and had a few issues, the second was a '93 build and had no issues in my tenure.

[citroenxm]

Pah your all wrong.. the haynes is sooooo full of mistakes and laughs no one uses them to fix their cars!

[Dieselman]

I don't find Haynes manuals to have mistakes, but the XM one mainly references Series 2 cars.

[xmexclusive]

I use Haynes on occasions but not step by step so no dirty finger prints on my copy.

All Haynes manuals are written to a standard format in a short time frame with limited resources.
For the XM they used the Citroen workshop manual and "borrowed" two XM's from dealers.
The cars were stripped to do various workshop jobs and obtain photos, reassembled and returned to the dealers.
Being relatively new cars there were none of the age related "will not come apart" problems that we see with our XM's.
Model variations get some coverage but way short of complete.
I believe the small volume of UK XM's dictated Haynes tardy publication and single minor rewrite.

This compares with the French RTA XM workshop manual which was published promptly.
It was also updated and republished yearly for Mk 1's and twice a year for Mk 2's.

John