If you thought that DS was optimistic in believing it was a rival to premium brands such as BMW and Mercedes-Benz, I wonder what you made of the news that it would in future like to become “the Louis Vuitton of the automotive industry”, rubbing shoulders with Bentley and Rolls-Royce.
Let’s take it seriously for a moment. DS design director Thierry Métroz acknowledges that this is a “dream”, that it could take the brand another 10 years to achieve (on top of the 10 for which it has existed in its present form) and that it ultimately might never get there.
I’ll be amazed if it does – and it won’t do so by taking existing Stellantis platforms and tweaking them a bit, no matter how much the interiors, like that of the new N°8 crossover, are “more like Bentley than our German competitors” and regardless of how many key parts are changed.
Pushing back windscreens and lowering rooflines won’t be particularly persuasive.
True luxury is also territory never before occupied by a DS – not even one of the most striking cars in existence, the original Citroën DS19 of 1955.
That’s pretty old history, it’s true, but if they thought it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t have reused the DS name in the first place.
When new, the DS19 cost £150 more than other Citroën models, at over £1400. That turned out to be too expensive for many buyers in its home market, yet it wasn’t even near luxury pricing.
The Bentley Continental of the day cost £3295 and the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud £3395, off the peg. By the time they had been to a coachbuilder, they could cost much more.
The DS19 was never in that sphere. It was advertised as “one of the world’s most advanced cars” at the same time as a Rolls-Royce was being 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 were, say, the first brand within the Stellantis group to be given the newest battery or motor technology, it would have to offer a tremendous advantage, of the sort that’s harder to come by today, to cut through.
Besides, would the average car buyer even know, remember or care that the original DS was about new technology?
What they would do is remember the way it looked. It’s a unique, beautiful and in some ways still futuristic shape 70 years on. You don’t have to be a car nerd to know and appreciate the design.
It strikes me as odd, then, for Métroz to bang on about interior materials or “an attractive design with a lot of character” as DS makes a car that, while making a couple of tiny nods to the original, doesn’t have overtly identifiable cues, stance or lines, nor its impossible elegance.
The N°8 doesn’t look to me like a 21st-century DS19. You might disagree.
But if I’d been shown it without badges and asked who it was made by, I’d have answered: “Haven’t a clue, mate.”
To avoid retro cues is clearly deliberate. As Citroën design chief Pierre Leclercq said last week about the brand potentially reprising the 2CV: “The things you remember from Citroën is not especially that you want to redo the shape of the vehicles that have been good.”
That’s laudable enough, because car designers like to design new things. But are new things what customers want to buy? Keeping shapes but changing philosophy seems a safer bet.
Take the Land Rover Defender, Fiat 500 and Mini: models that spent time out of production and don’t do the same things they started out doing but are easily identifiable as modern iterations of decades-old designs. Entering this arena, too, is the Renault 5.
It won a couple of big awards recently, but what will please Renault most is that nearly 10,000 examples left French showrooms last month.
Perhaps I’m exposing the reason why I don’t run a car company.
But if I intended to restart the DS brand and wanted to push it as far upmarket as I could, I think the first thing I’d do is actually make a new DS.
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Rolls Royce, Bentley, Maybach, yep, that's the first three brands that come to mind when describing the epitome of Luxury high end cars, they look feel inside / outside special, as if they've been hand made, I don't know about reliability but I think are bought as the default prestige brand, What DS will be a posted up version of main stream cars , Ford brought Vignale back and I haven't seen many of them and still based on current cars.
Yeah the original DS was stunning still looks pretty futuristic after all this time, when you look at the modern reintroduction of the DS as a model range with the 2009 onwards DS3 remember what a hit that was something a bit posher and different within the Citroen line up people really took notice at the time and it sold well they were everywhere.
Future models like the Citroen DS4 and DS5 didn’t have quite the same success but were still interesting products withing the wider Citroen model lineup being a bit fancier styled and finished.
Eventually splitting DS off as a stand alone brand I’m not sure that works too well, rather than being an enhanced Citroen within the greater Citroen lineup even is some of the DS products have be interesting.
As other manufactures have found to their cost spinning off a supposed premium brand and pushing upmarket is very difficult to do successfully Lexus being one of the few to be successful others have unfortunately sank without a trace.
Nobody, except some French patriots, will not buy a French luxury car. History proves that past French luxury cars have never been successful. They were unreliable (see C5 and C6) and have never been considered premium. DS trying to follow Bentley and Rolls Royce, even Maybach/Mercedes, is Double Stupid.