CITROEN C3 AIR, 1998
Everyone loves to be beside the seaside, don’t we? And of course, life on the French Riviera is the ultimate dream, with weather so relentlessly sunny that you barely even need a roof on your car.
Citroen was evoking that intensely at the Paris motor show in 1998, revealing its C3 Air concept. The company was in full teasing-thenew-C3 mode, even though the hatchback wouldn’t be launched for another three or four years. It was stuck with a load of quite old cars in its range, so it needed to prove that it was young and hip and stylish and all that. What better way to show how fun and frivolous you are than a fun and frivolous convertible.
And what a convertible. It was a bold statement from the French carmaker, with its cab forward lean and blob-like proportions. It had giant deflector windows at the front by the wing mirrors, presumably in an effort to prevent your carefully blowdried bouffant from volumising on the way back to the villa, seats that folded in the back to create a pickup-style loadspace and jaunty roof pillars that could be configured in a number of different ways to create different styles of cabriolet.
The C3 Air concept was a masterclass in pared back simplicity inside, too – no instrument panel to speak of, just a rotating blob at the back of the dash near the base of the windscreen with a fuel, temperature and speed gauge and that was it. No infotainment, just a rotary ventilation control near the gearstick for passengers to play with. Still, stops any arguments about what to play on the radio.
Sadly, the C3 Air concept was also a masterclass in the disappointing reality of production cars versus concept dreams. It’s not like Citroen has ever been scared of being bold – less than a year after revealing this concept its Xsara Picasso would go on sale, a small MPV designed so you couldn’t tell the front and back ends apart. If anything, that car was even wilder than the 1994 Xanae concept that prefigured it.
A broadly similar but conceptually worse version of the C3 Air concept went into production a year after the C3 hatchback in 2003, badged Pluriel, with another concept car in between in 1999. Clearly someone at Citroen HQ had been pleased with the C3 Air concept’s rapturous reception, but the final car was less Antibes, more Eastbourne.
The C3 Air concept was so bad it was cool, whereas the Pluriel was so bad it was bad. The roof heavy and fussy, the car wobbly when you tried to engage any of the lifestyle elements. It just didn’t look quite as fun as the concept. Of course, no car ever does, but we can dream, can’t we? Just like we still dream of cruising the Riviera in a flimsy soft top.