Oh, Citroën, you tease! I hope you’re not playing with my feelings here. The company has been teasing the idea of a re-born 2CV since this summer, and in the past week or so they’ve really pushed the throttle on the flat-twin of their PR department, which has been issuing a whole series of citrus-hued teaser images of the upcoming concept car, a concept that will hopefully lead to a production car. I’m excited.
The promise has been that the car will be an unashamed retro tribute to the original deux chevaux, and, perhaps more importantly, will keep to the spirit of the original car by being actually cheap. Early pricing estimates were targeting under €15,000. That’s under $17,500 in Freedom Eagle Bucks, which is gleefully cheap for a modern EV. I hope they can stick to that.
The earlier teaser image was a shadowy full-car picture, basically a silhouette:
That definitely feels like a re-born 2CV, at least in general shape. This new batch of teaser images is more about details, along with some slightly cryptic images that hint at 2CV lore. Like this one, which is pretty easy:
Two chess knights. Is that a reference to Two Nights in Bangkok, from the musical Chess? Wait that was just one night, and I’m being silly. This is clearly a reference to two horses, the deux chevaux from the old tax scheme where the car was rated at two steam horses, and from there where the car got its name.
Here, you can see all of the teasers from Citroën’s Instagram here:
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That one is pretty clear, referencing the old corrugated “ripple bonnet” used until 1960, and then those knights.
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There’s the hood and headlight teaser; I think this may be the first modern EV to pretend to have non-integrated headlamps of any sort.
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Then we have the wheels, which definitely look like the original wheels, though they’ve added a decadent fourth bolt, which feels like showy ostentation, but whatever. People today are too soft to really appreciate three-lug wheels, I guess. And the venting suggests brakes won’t be inboard this time around.
The next image in the post seems to show a marker lamp on the C-pillar that evokes how early 2CV turn signals were mounted high on that pillar, where they could be seen from the front or rear, allowing for only two instead of four, a tribute to Citroën’s legendary skinflintitude.
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The umbrella is a reference to the original design brief for the car from Pierre-Jules Boulanger, who started the whole thing with his “Très Petite Voiture” (TPV, for “very small car”) program, and famously described what he wanted as “an umbrella on four wheels”or sometimes as “four seats under an umbrella.”
The other image is a door handle that looks surprisingly and wonderfully like the original 2CV’s furniture-like small door handles.
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And finally, these eggs, a reference to the 2CV’s original design brief that included the demand that the car should be able to transport a basket of eggs on the seat over a plowed field without breaking a single egg. Remember, this was a car designed to replace horses and carts for French peasants, and this is also why the suspension of a 2CV is so legendarily soft.
I like how much Citroën is playing with the car’s extensive lore with these; here, I even made a chart so you can see all the references in one easy location:
I hope that helps! Maybe print it out on some foldable or rollable receipt-type paper so you can pull it out and reference it as the need arises.
The official reveal for this resurrected 2CV is October 11; so many times these kinds of things are a letdown, but I’m still hopeful here. I don’t mind an EV take on the 2CV; I think if electric motors and batteries were cheap and usable enough back in the 1930s when the 2CV was being designed, they’d have been considered. If they work now, great.
I think the crucial concept to keep is one of simplicity. If Citroën can keep that at the forefront, and make something that genuinely adheres to the original 2CV’s core character traits of reliability and extreme affordability and classlessness and unpretentiousness, and is not just some neo-retro-designed pastiche, then I think they can really have something.
At least that’s what I hope! I think hoping it’ll come to America is a little too far, but for the rest? I think there’s a chance.
Any chance they could make it light as well as simple?
I’m not hoping for too much, but I’d be happy if it only weighs twice as much as the original.
And I want a wilfully baffling device for changing from forwards to reverse.
And a manual hand pump for the windscreen washers.
Hopefully they also make a Méhari out of it.
And a twin-engined/motored Sahara.
Well, being electric, emissions and fuel economy are irrelevant, so that means it only has to meet safety and design conformity regulations. That’s still a lot, but, theoretically, EVs should be cheaper and easier to federalize than ICE vehicles, which also means they should theoretically be viable with lower sales volumes, so, I’m choosing to be hopeful that it could come here. I mean, it couldn’t sell any worse than the 500e, right?
Um, I really now want Michelin white letter tires in exactly that typeface.
Same!
My train of thought:
“Oh, neat, it’s something Stellantis can put up against the Twing-”
“…ah, crap, it’s made by Stellantis.”
Oh…crap, I forgot about that too.
So does that mean we are getting a badge-engineered variant here in the states with a Hellcat or at least a Hurricane?
How amazing would it be if Citroen kept the unique front-rear-linked suspension design of the 2CV