I Didn’t Realize That Citroën Was Part Of This Exclusive And Very Specific Weird Car Club

Citroën is known, as I think I’ve made abundantly clear, for making some pretty idiosyncratic cars. That’s why I’m so fond of them. Well, maybe this goes more for Citroën past as opposed to modern Stellantis-run Citroën, but you get the idea. Still, for all of their weirdness, there’s really one weird-car hallmark that Citiroën hasn’t really touched: rear engines.

Well, I guess that’s not entirely true. The Citroën 2CV Sahara quite famously had an engine in the rear, but that is only because that was the only place to stick a second engine, which was the way that the company achieved a 4WD 2CV. So, yeah, that’s a rear engine, but it’s one of two engines, so that doesn’t quite count. I’m talking about single-engined cars with rear-mounted engines, like a Volkswagen Beetle or Renault Dauphine or Chevy Corvair or something.

Still, I’m not going to pass up a reason to show a 2CV Sahara cutaway:

I never get tired of those. So, anyway, Citroën is known for odd cars, but not really rear-engined cars. And, when it comes to rear-engined carmakers, I’ve written before about a strange and usually unrealized dream these companies seem to have, the dream of a rear-engined, streamlined one-box sort of zeppelin-shaped car.

Really, it’s amazing how often it seems to come up. Volkswagen/Porsche, Tatra, Fiat, all these companies had prototypes of cars like this, or, sometimes, actually realized models. Other smaller carmakers like Stout or Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion played with these ideas as well, but only a few of these cars actually made it to any kind of production, like the Stout Scarab or, more successfully, the Fiat Multipla. I think we can out the VW Type 2 Microbus in this category, too, if we’re feeling generous.

The basic traits of these cars are a sort of mono-volume body, usually quite streamlined (at least streamlined according to early-to-mid 20th century understanding) and an engine tucked away at the rear. These cars could be fairly large, but they used their interior space generally well, being essentially like sleeker-looking vans.

What I never realized, somehow, is that in this set of more expected rear-engine proponents like Fiat and VW and Tatra, Citroën at least once experimented with the idea of a streamlined, fuselage-like rear engined car, and they were doing it early, as in 1936 early, essentially contemporarily with the Stout Scarab, one of the most famous pioneers of this odd breed of car.

The experimental Citroën in question was a concept car that was part of Citroën’s bold 22CV program, which was essentially a plan to make a V8 version of the famous front-wheel drive pioneer, the Traction Avant.

22CV refers to the French tax classification system that gave the 2CV its name, but since this proposed 3.8-liter V8 engine would have made about 100 hp, very much no joke back in the 1930s, it would understandably be taxed at a much higher rate, 20 more than the humble flat-twin 2CV.

The 22CV was intended to be a production car, the flagship of the Citroën fleet, a large, fast, luxurious FWD machine, available in sedan, convertible, and even longer sedan forms. It was shown at the 1934 Paris Salon auto show, and there were even drivable versions for demonstration rides, but those were suspected to have used Ford flathead V8 engines.

For a variety of reasons, the 22CV never made it to production, though a number of prototypes were built. And while it’s not clear if one of those prototypes was ever the rear-engined concept, that did at least exist in the form of, well, at least one drawing. I’ve been looking for other examples of the car, renderings, blueprints, whatever, but so far have had no luck.

From the one drawing I have seen, we do seem to have an ideal member of this retrofuturistic concept: we have the 22CV Traction Avant drivetrain re-located to the rear, and everything else wrapped in a streamlined envelope that feels more like a train than an automobile.

The doors and side windows look to be borrowed from the longer-wheelbase Traction Avant bodies, but here we have those doors inset into a body with glass or maybe more likely perspex/plexiglass roof panels, all four wheels skirted, and a dorsal fin much like the contemporary Tatra T77.

There’s a grille there, too, which makes sense, seeing as how these were liquid-cooled engines, so there must be a radiator and a lot of long hoses in there, and the headlights are inset behind the grille, much like a Peugeot 402 from that same era, with its “fencing mask” grille that contained the headlamps.

I wish there was more information about this car out there, but it seems everything written is all going off that one promotional image from the company. I’m amazed how early this concept was, and how much it is like all of those similar attempts that followed, well into the 1960s. Citroën is just not a company I ever associate with rear engines, so this is especially odd and compelling to think about.

The 22CV itself is something of a Citroën mystery, a lost car of sorts, and this rear-engined zeppelin version is even more rarified and strange on top of all that. Part of me wishes history had progressed down lines that would have made cars like this common, and in such a world we’d likely travel a lot by dirigibles docking to masts on skyscrapers, eating in brightly-lit automats and looking stylish in hats.

That’s not where we ended up, but it’s fascinating to see records of these refugees from a future that never was.