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If you thought DS was optimistic in believing that it was a rival of premium brands such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz, I wonder what you have made of the news that it would like to be in the future “the Louis Vuitton of the Automotive industry “, rubbing shoulders with Bentley and Rolls-Royce.
Let’s take it seriously. DS Design Director Thierry Métrroz acknowledges that this is a “dream”, that it could take the brand for another 10 years to reach (in addition to the 10 for which it existed in its current form) and that it might never come.
I will be amazed if so -and it will not do this by taking existing Stellantis platforms and adjusting them a bit, regardless of how much the interior, such as that of the new N ° 8 -Crosover, are ” More like Bentley than our German competitors ”and regardless of how many important parts are changed.
Pushing back windows and lowering roof lines will not be particularly convincing.
WHERE luxury Is territory never previously occupied by a DS – not even one of the most striking cars that exist, the original Citroën DS19 of 1955.
That is a fairly old history, it is true, but if they thought it didn’t matter, they would not have reused the DS name in the first place.
When new, the DS19 £ 150 more than other Citroën models cost, at more than £ 1400. That turned out to be too expensive for many buyers in the home market, but it was not even close to luxury prices.
The Bentley Continental of the day cost £ 3295 and the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud £ 3395, from the pen. By the time they had been to a coachbuilder, they could cost much more.
The DS19 was never in that atmosphere. It was advertised as “one of the world’s most advanced cars” and at the same time a Rolls-Royce was marketed as “the best car in the world”.
Could a modern DS be one of the world’s most advanced cars? Perhaps, but even if DS, for example, the first brand within the Stellantis group was that the latest battery or motorcycle technology would get, it should offer a huge advantage of the kind that is more difficult to find, to cut.
By the way, would the average car buyer even know, remember it or indicate that the original DS was about new technology?
What they would do is remember what it looked like. It is a unique, beautiful and in some respects still futuristic form 70 years later. You don’t have to be a car to know and appreciate the design.
It seems strange to me, for Métrroz to save on interior materials or “an attractive design with a lot of character”, because DS makes a car that, while making a few small nods to the original, is not openly identifiable signals, posture or lines , nor his impossible elegance.
The N ° 8 does not look like a 21st-century DS19. Maybe you may not agree.
But if I had shown it without badges and asked who it was made, I would have answered: “Have no idea, size.”
Preventing retro instructions is clearly intentional. As Citroën Design Chief Pierre Leclercq said last week about the brand that may repeat the 2CV: “The things you remember from Citroën is not especially that you want to do the shape of the vehicles that have been good again.”
That is commendable enough, because autoontwerpers like to design new things. But are new things that customers want to buy? Keeping shapes, but changing philosophy seems to be a safer gamble.
Take the Land Rover defender, Fiat 500 and Mini: models that have spent time from production and do not do the same things they started to do, but are easy to recognize as modern iterations of decades of old designs. Entering this arena is also the Renault 5.
It recently won a few big prizes, but what Renault will be the most is that nearly 10,000 examples left French showrooms last month.
Maybe I expose the reason why I don’t run a car company Run.
But if I intended to restart the DS brand and wanted to push it as far as possible chic as possible, I think the first thing I would do is actually make a new DS.
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