Citroen DS is ready to build a new myth in China
PARIS — The Citroen DS was sprung on an unsuspecting public at the 1955 Paris Motor Show, its torpedolike body draped over technical innovations like a selfleveling suspension, a semiautomatic transmission and inboard front disc brakes.
Almost any of those features would have caused a sensation.
Together, the package was almost too much to absorb at a time when many cars — including Citroen’s venerable Traction Avant and 2CV — still clung to an upright prewar look.
“This car was considered a UFO when it was launched,” said Arnaud Ribault, the sales and marketing director for PSA Peugeot Citroen’s new third brand, called simply DS, which is being introduced to the European public at the Paris Motor Show, which runs to Oct. 19. “Just in the middle of those square cars, you have a rocket.”
The otherworldliness of the original DS, at a time when Europe was finally emerging from wartime darkness, inspired philosopher Roland Barthes to include it in Mythologies, his 1957 exploration of French culture. Of the DS, Barthes wrote, “The new Citroen has obviously fallen from the sky,” describing it as a “goddess” (the letters DS are pronounced like “deesse,” the French word for goddess) that might “mark a change in the automotive mythology.”
But mythmaking or not, Citroen was in business to sell cars, and while the French public clamored to buy the DS, there were bugs to be worked out, said Rudy Heilig of Citroen Concours of America, a San Diego restoration and repair shop, and the author of a buyers’ guide to the DS. “They had a lot of teething problems with the brakes, the transmission, the hydraulics,” he said.
By 1960, the initial problems had been resolved, and Citroen sold well over 1 million DSs and its variants — including a station wagon and cabriolets and special bodies by coachbuilder Henri Chapron — before production ended in 1975.
Outside of France, the DS appealed mainly to buyers “with a bit of an odd personality” for whom Saabs or Peugeots were too tame, said Heilig, whose family has been servicing or selling Citroens since 1949.
For those who needed more convincing, he said, his father offered a simple demonstration of the DS’ magic carpet ride. He would put customers in a DS, Heilig said, take them to an alley near his Vancouver, British Columbia, dealership that was “pothole city,” and “run it up and down that alley at 35 or 40 mph, which no other car was capable of doing without your head hitting the ceiling.”
Fast-forward nearly 60 years and the DS name has been reborn as a PSA luxury brand intended to have special appeal in the lucrative Chinese market.
The DS display in Paris, with its muted colors and thick carpeting, featured a scissor-door concept car, the Divine, and a version of the DS3 coupe styled by designer Ines de La Fressange.
Citroen had revived the DS name in 2010 for the DS3, a premium hatchback in the vein of the Audi A3, followed shortly by the DS4, a five-door hatchback, and the DS5, a high-style crossover. New in the past year are the DS5 LS, a sedan assembled at a new plant in Shenzhen, China, that will sell for about $24,500, and the DS6 sport utility.
Ribault said that since 2010 PSA had sold some 500,000 cars with the DS nameplate around the world, including 10,000 in China in the first six months of 2014. There are 66 dealers in China, he said, with a goal of 100 by year-end.
The DS brand resonates with upwardly mobile Chinese buyers, he said, who are drawn to its associations with French style. “Our origin is Paris,” Ribault said. “We have the DNA of luxury from Paris.
We have presented this image of Paris.”
Ribault has also enlisted Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong in the service of DS.
De Gaulle, a fan of the original DS who famously survived a 1962 assassination attempt in one, established diplomatic ties with Mao in 1964, a move that did not endear him to Western allies at the height of the Cold War but earned him lasting admiration in China. For the 50th anniversary of the treaty signing this year, PSA sent the same bullet-riddled DS to Beijing, where it was displayed at the National Museum of China.
And during the official rollout of the DS brand in China, PSA showed images from Deng Xiaoping’s visit to France in 1975 to meet President Valery Giscard d’Estaing.
The car in which Deng left the Elysee Palace was, of course, a DS.
By 2020, PSA hopes the DS brand will expand to a full line of premium cars along the lines of Audi. “This is the start of a big adventure,” Ribault said.