Best Car For Elephants: Cold Start

Over the years, certain cars have found niche uses that we can assume the manufacturers had never imagined. I seriously doubt the postwar German engineers that developed the Type 2 Volkswagen Transporter ever envisioned it would be the vehicle of choice for tie-dye clad pot smokers following the Grateful Dead from concert to concert each summer. I remember a Dodge dealer in the 80s explaining the demise of the Omni-based Dodge Rampage pickup as, “once we had sold one to every pool-cleaning guy in the country, we had pretty much exhausted the market.”

Still, it does make sense that a VW bus would be used to haul people around, if not such a specific group on such a specific journey, and of course a pool-cleaning guy needs something with a bed to haul all those skimmers and buckets of chlorine and whatnot.

But elephant hauling?

I had never put any thought into what kind of car an owner of a baby elephant might consider until I saw this image from a 1979 UK Citroen CX brochure:

A copy of this exact brochure was obtained by my ten-year-old self after attending the Birmingham NEC Motor Show when we lived in England (complete with a typewritten, soul-crushing letter to my dad stating “we are afraid that importing our cars to the United States is not possible at this time”). The photography is every bit as good as the images in the Citroen-Maserati SM brochure that I profiled a little while back, and remember, this is pre-Photoshop era. Making the lighting effects on these full-spread pages must have been through some old school alchemy (please excuse my inability to fully doctor out the seam between the brochure’s facing pages).

Breathtaking shots that perfectly capture the essence of the car beneath the modified steel-gray skies of the British isles.

The later pages of the brochure talk about the CX Familiale estate/wagon, and as you can see it’s a tremendously spacious thing inside with room for three forward facing rows as well as an immense space for cargo behind – a marvel in today’s era where most third rows scrape the tailgate. The CX Familiale also boasts the highest count of sunvisors in any one car.

Ah, but the true party trick of the CX was always the hydropneumatic suspension, which allowed not only for superlative ride quality but also for perfectly level ride height regardless of the cargo in back. Baby dumbo proves this out in a dramatic way. I’d recommend air fresheners, and for God’s sake, put plastic down in the cargo area first.

What the brochure fails to note is the elephant in the room (or car) could have also made use of the ball-shaped ashtray located on top of the center console, easily accessible by his or her extended trunk. I doubt the animal would have smoked Gitanes, but had our driver filled the alien-helmet-looking thing with peanuts, I am certain his pet pachyderm could have enjoyed a snack en route to wherever one takes an elephant.

That’s what I call niche marketing.