DS will take inspiration from the first-generation DS 3 – its first stand-alone car from the mid-2010s – for the next iteration of the hatch, which will arrive in the next few years with a “sporty, hot” and "futuristic” design, DS design chief Thierry Métroz has told Autocar.
The current DS 3 is the oldest model in the brand’s three-car line-up, which includes the recently refreshed (and renamed) No4 and the radical-looking No8 flagship.
The next instalment of DS’s entry model will also follow that new naming strategy to become the No3. But it will be completely redesigned from today’s model and could even push into “another segment”, said Métroz at the Brussels motor show on Friday. Métroz's comments echo what DS boss Xavier Peugeot told Autocar last year about the next DS 3 “creating its own segment”.
Asked how the redesign could rejuvenate sales of the DS 3, which is now the brand's slowest-selling model – especially in the UK, where it sold just 250 examples last year – Métroz said DS is looking at the first-generation car, which remains its best-selling model to date.
“We would like to take the inspiration of [the original DS 3] because it was so successful on the market,” said Métroz. “We sold 500,000 DS 3 Gen1s. It was a success story. It had many, many customers in France, but also in [the] UK.”
Asked what inspiration it could take from that car, he added: “We want to take inspiration from the Gen1, but in a very futuristic way. And what I don't want to do is retro design, but we'd like to keep some design elements which are very strong from the Gen1”.
Expanding on that, he pointed to the hatch’s “sporty… very simple” design, especially the rear lights – “squarish with a 3D effect” – as an example of what the brand wants to do with the next car.
“What I love looking back,” he said, “is the super-sleek, very sensible, very round [design]. To keep this kind of approach [is what we want]: very simple design, no additional design feature [or] cladding, very clean, very pure, but very expressive.”
The brand wants to develop that for the new car with “new technologies”, said Métroz, adding that DS will “reinvent the same design, but in a very, very modern way”.
However, while the new entry-level model will also take the same new lighting signature introduced by the No8 to keep a cohesion between the line-up (“the light signature is very important for DS; I think it's really unique and very strong”), Métroz said: “It’s very important that the design will [be] iconic – something very unique, unique only for DS 3. Different from No4 and No8, different from [the incoming] No7.” He added: “It's a very challenging car.”
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I have fond childhood memories of the DS and SM, which were the past Citroens sold officially in the US. When my high school contemporaries were face planting themselves into Sports Illustrated, I was reading Autocar, Car and Motor and drooling over the cars far too good for the ignorant American market. To watch PSA, then Stagnantis (Spelled that way deliberately) utterly sanitize Citroen and DS into some of the most boring (sometimes just plain hideous) designs (IMO) has been very dissapointing to me. Back in 2017, I rented a C4 Cactus to drive in The Netherlands because it truly tickled the extreme end of my sometimes absurd sense of aesthetic. It was FUN. While overseas earlier this year, I got a good look at the latest DS vehicles and all I could think was they were (are?) the end result of a 5 year old after a few espressos trying their hand at Origami. Every new Citroen I saw looked like just about any other car, the unique identity gone, due to the heads of Stagnantis and what could only be referred to as "Design by committee". A line I recall from a book I read many years ago: "A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain". Stagnantis has become the 21st century version of the American General Motors from the 1980s. Cookie cutter crap. They have singularly misread the US market to an epically ignorant level. Look up the latest generation Dodge Charger if you want a good laugh. They havent been able to give them away here. Also, Stellantis sounds like the perfect name for an erectile disfunction medication except that most of their cars (Here in the US) CAUSE erectile disfunction.