Fifty years ago, the European press was hunting a revolutionary new Citroen sedan, but didn’t find it.
The secretive Michelin brothers, who had run the company since taking it over in a 1935 bankruptcy, kept the DS 19 hidden until the 1955 Paris Salon de l’Automobile–and sprung one of the biggest surprises in motoring history.
Even as crowds milled around the Citroen stand at the show, designer Flaminio Bertoni trumped his own creation with an astonishing piece of artwork. A new Deesse (French word for goddess, pronounced DS), without wheels and with a smooth bottom to show off its aero styling–was balanced on a pole.
“If I were to see something today as unusual as that was then, I’d assume it had landed from a different planet,” chuckles J Mays, group vice president of design for Ford Motor Co. and author of such novel designs as the New Beetle and Audi TT from his days at Volkswagen. Bertoni’s aero-sculpture captured the spirit of the age, says Chris Bangle, BMW’s director of group design, who is responsible for 7-Series with the large rear end and for introducing more curves into the BMW line.
“The idea that future cars will fly had just taken a big step. That process got an enormous kick after the war, when cars got tailfins and rockets, right into the ’60s. Man’s mobility is a process toward the freedom of flight. That was an acceptable conclusion,” he says.
The spaceship-like DS 19 was tested under the highest security on a guarded track with 12-foot walls. If anyone were spotted or a plane flew over a siren sounded and the cars were hidden in the trees. That secrecy launched a sales boom that wouldn’t be matched until the Ford Mustang almost 20 years later, when 121,538 Mustangs were sold in the first five months after its mid-year launch.
Citroen took 12,000 orders for the DS 19 on opening day. By the show’s end 80,000 people had signed up to buy the new car for a shade under 1 million old francs ($3,295 in 1957 and about $20,000 in today’s money). But Citroen’s production department was overwhelmed, only 69 DS 19s were delivered by year-end, and show orders were still being filled two years later.
“In America, England and Germany you had a multitude of boxes with rounded corners and this thing pops onto the scene looking like an aerodynamicist’s dream,” says Mays. “It’s easily one of the most influential cars of the 20th Century.”
“It was handled like sculpture,” says Bangle. “You look at it and have the feeling of artists at work with enormous technical know-how.”
The DS’s self-leveling, hydro-pneumatic suspension could be raised by the driver as high as 10 inches and swept it along the post-war French roads at 75 m.p.h. The car was known for “kneeling down” so the passengers could get into it then rising up before driving off.
“That put the customers in center focus and developed high-end technology around them,” says Bangle. “It was a long time before the rest of the industry became so user-centered.”
The DS’ tear-drop body boasted a drag coefficient of 0.34, still an excellent number. (By comparison, the popular Toyota Camry and Honda Accord achieved a CD of 0.34 in the late 1990s; the 2005 Accord is 0.30 and the Camry is 0.28.) Huge windows permitted an all-round view, and the roof was translucent fiberglass, bathing the interior in light. The rear turn signals were in the roof.
The car’s 2,200 psi hydraulic system ran the suspension, rack-and-pinion power steering, semi-automatic transmission and inboard disc brakes, which were applied via a tiny button on the floor.
Then there was the front-wheel-drive, a novelty at the time.
Gear shifting was accomplished with two fingers, as a hydraulic servo activated the clutch. The car was started by swinging the column shift over to the left side, where it engaged the starter. The steering wheel had only one spoke that curved to the rim to protect drivers in an accident. Carpets were thickly padded; seats were like armchairs.
The rigid caisson frame was made up of 90 pressings, and the body’s 2,300 panels–it was too complex to be pressed out of a big sheet–were held together by 7,000 welds. Yet fenders were attached by one or two bolts, and the car could be driven as a skeleton.
Wheels were attached with one central bolt and, in the absence of a spare tire, the car could be driven home on three in the event of a flat.
Highly respected publications in the British motoring press were dumbfounded.
“One of the biggest advances in production car design in the history of motoring,” said Lawrence Pomeroy of The Motor.
“A startling machine which at once renders half the cars of the world out of date,” declared John Bolster of Autosport.
“This car will have a profound effect on world technology,” wrote Gordon Wilkins in The Autocar.
But did it? Nobody’s making sedans that resemble the DS. Only Bob Bache’s 1963 Rover 2000 copied the construction technique, but he made it conservatively square.
“Cars don’t have negative wedge today, they tend to get larger toward the rear,” Mays observes.
Mays thinks that the DS 19 was hurt by being too far from what was socially acceptable–it was not the typical rounded box with prominent grille and chrome all over.
“The DS is pure expression of the particularity of French spirit. The French love it; it’s a piece of their identity,” says designer Anne Asensio, who grew up in France and worked for Renault for 16 years before coming to GM to oversee Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac and GMC in 2000. “It changed the perception of a generation of designers because it was revolutionary in that it integrated function into a simple cultural form.”
It had no visible grille and no chrome with double chevrons on the trunk the only identifying mark.
Economics played a big a part in DS history, says former Citroen executive Richard Bonfond. The company’s problem was how to maintain such a complicated invention.
Bonfond lives in Sacramento and his father, Albert, headed Citroen service in the U.S. for 20 years. It stopped selling cars in the U.S. in 1972.
“I think the simpler ID [another pun, idee is French for idea] saved the company,” says Bonfond. “There were so many technical innovations and teething problems with the DS. None of the technicians knew anything about them, and there were no books. The ID that came out in 1957 was much simpler and cheaper to run, with just the brilliant suspension.”
The DS suspension used liquid to transfer weight to nitrogen spheres, which were in effect the “springs.” Mechanical clearances in the high-pressure system required manufacturing accuracy to one-tenth of a micron (a micron being one-millionth of a meter), and it was unforgiving in daily operation. Leaks became gushers.
“The theoretical vision was so far ahead of the technical capability,” says Mays. “It’s like trying to run a G4 PowerBook with tube technology.”
But DS 19 designer Flaminio Bertoni (not to be confused with Nuccio Bertone) was used to thinking outside the box. He was a noted artist and sculptor who went to work in Paris for Citroen in 1932, when his mother wouldn’t let him marry his pregnant girlfriend.
Bertoni is the first man to sculpt a car in clay, creating the 1934 “Traction Avant” in one night. He found his equal in Citroen engineers Pierre Boulanger and Andre Lefebvre. In 1935 he began work on the diminutive Citroen 2CV “tin snail,” which reduced the automotive world to laughter in 1948 (and sold 7 million copies before it was discontinued in 1990). In 1939 he designed the “H” van, a corrugated steel box on wheels with a pig snout.
In 1945 Bertoni took on the redesign of the “Traction Avant” with Boulanger, Lefebvre and hydraulics expert Paul Mages. It was Mages who developed the suspension that’s now a Citroen hallmark. Mages also designed an anti-roll system, developed anti-lock brakes and toyed with a hydrostatic transmission with hydraulic pumps at each wheel (too noisy). He also considered a joystick instead of a steering wheel, hydraulic-powered cooling fan, wipers, alternator and starter motor–even a roof-mounted air brake. So the DS 19 could have been much stranger.
The Citroen DS 19 was manufactured from 1955-75 and 1.45 million were sold; perhaps 5 percent still exist. There were at least 18 models, including a station wagon and very desirable “decapotable,” or convertible, by coachbuilder Henri Chapron, who also made coupes and limousines. President Charles deGaulle was a huge fan and escaped assassination in 1962 when his DS got away after its tires were shot up (see “Day of The Jackal”).
The 2-liter 4-cylinder engines was improved from 75 horsepower, the principal complaint about the early car, to a fuel-injected 141-horsepower unit. The only major redesign came in 1967, when the DS received four headlights, with the inner two turning with the wheels.
The last known DS is a convertible built by Chapron in 1978, three years after the end of production. It was based on a 1973 sedan.
“It always looked modern, and the facelift made it look advanced,” says Wolfgang Gotschke, the Special Vehicle Team design manager at Ford.
“Very often a design can be avant garde and technically conventional, or the other way around. It all came together in the DS 19, and it’s very significant. Conventional ideas have prevailed over revolutionary ones in the auto industry. Most of the revolutionaries were broken, but Citroen didn’t fail.”
