It’s Time To Appreciate How Pants-Dampeningly Clever The Citroën C3 Pluriel Was

It’s been a long week, hasn’t it? Sure it has. We’ve all worked hard and busted our humps all week, and in the outside world there’s war and uncertainty and the looming spectre of AI making us all into drooling simpletons and it’s just a lot. Now, we here at the Autopian could just throw up our hands and breakfasts and rake everything off our desks with a broad sweep of our arms and take off our shirts and wave them above our heads, helicopter-like, as we scream and wail and kick things, every thing, then stomp on other things and jam our fists into a pair of cups filled with some strangers’ beverages and eventually wrap ourselves up in an area rug and fling ourselves down a long staircase while wetting ourselves, but what would that accomplish, really?  Not much. Not enough.

No, we have a much better plan. Instead of losing our lettuce, I think a much better idea is to focus on something good, something right. Something that demonstrated the promise of the human mind, the power of industry and ingenuity and imagination. Something like the 2003 to 2010 Citroën C3 Pluriel.

Now, I know what you’re thinking; it’s a side effect of these pills I’m supposed to take. You’re thinking that the C3 Pluriel was on Top Gear’s worst car list back in 2013. Maybe you’re thinking it was panned in some other publication, or some jackass cornered you at a party and was badmouthing the car as they spilled a tepid Heineken on your shoes. The point is, screw them, all of them, all of those stunted Pluriel haters who value lame-ass things like “rationality” or “not getting caught without a roof in the rain” or whatever bullstench the go on about. Screw ’em. The Pluriel is above such small-mindedness.

Here’s the deal with the Pluriel: Citroën took their already kinda-quirky small hatchback and made a convertible, but they didn’t just stop there. With a healthy dose of inspiration from the legendary 2CV’s flexibility and novel design, they decided to make the Pluriel into so much more. Four more, to be precise.

Yes, the Pluriel was very plural, in the sense that the car could be configured into five quite distinct variations. Citroën had names for these, but I’m including my own and explanations in parentheticals: a 3-door saloon (a closed 2-door hatchback), a panoramic saloon (hatchback with a full-length sunroof), a cabriolet (a convertible with fixed door frames, sometimes called a cabrio coach), a Spider (full convertible – a roadster, but you can’t put up the top without the side rails), and a Spider Pick-Up (a sort of convertible two-seat light duty pickup truck. Maybe a ute is more accurate).

Sure, there were some flaws, mostly having to do with the fact that those big side arched roof rails had to be stashed somewhere when removed, and were required to put the roof back up, but come on! There was so much innovative thought that went into this, and each of these variants is pretty distinct and has its own uses and charms.

Italdesign came up with this clever scheme, and first showed a concept of the Pluriel at the 1999 Frankfurt Auto Show. I’m pretty amazed something so ambitious made it to market, but if there’s any company that was likely to try it, it would be Citroën, who have never been fearful of the weird.

There’s one detail I especially find impressive about how the Pluriel origamis itself into its various forms. It’s the clever way the roof fabric and rear window assembly get out of the way so you can have the full open-roof experience for the cabrio-coach, spider/roadster, or ute configurations. Just look at this:

That’s some masterful stowing-and-going, if you ask me. Let’s look at that step-by-step:

So, drop tailgate, move floor panel, swing down roof/rear window package into well, replace floor panel to cover. It’s seamless! Look at that flat floor thats left after the roof panel is stowed away – you’d never know anything was under there. And then when you fold down the rear seat, the entire rear of the car is one long flat surface, which you can extend with the tailgate, which aligns perfectly to the floor level:

The length of that bed is pretty damn close to some small pickup beds like the Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz. Sure, you probably don’t want to load it up with gravel, but you could sure move a couch in there or a bunch of barrels of salt pork and hard tack for your expedition to find the Northwest Passage or put a couple of sleeping bags on there or whatever! It looks to be a hard plastic surface, not carpet or anything.

Also, I don’t see why you can’t have the ute configuration with the side rails in place? That’s pretty much what was happening in the video of dropping the rear window into the cubby if they then folded that back seat.

Why didn’t this catch on more? The idea of a Swiss Army Knife kind of car always seemed really appealing to me, but for whatever reason the few attempts at these really haven’t sold as well as you’d hope. Though, to be fair, I can’t think of that many examples. The Pluriel, of course, and perhaps the Nissan Pulsar NX:

…which transformed from a coupé to a targa to a shooting brake to a convertible with a roll bar. Maybe the issue is these solutions all require the storing of some bulky elements – roof rails or rear caps or whatever. Maybe the code really hasn’t been cracked for these kinds of extreme convertible cars just yet. Perhaps this concept needs to be applied to a larger SUV-type format, something with a midgate and a place to stash roof panels and can go from closed SUV to pickup truck to open-air Jeep-like thing, all without having to store anything anywhere. I think this is still a goal worth pursuing.

I’m also fond of the Pluriel because it feels like the closest modern attempt by Citroën to reclaim the legacy of one of my current obsessions, the 2CV. Citroën even had a “Charleston” version that made very obvious and direct visual connections to the 2CV:

The association I think worked, because it wasn’t just playing on some visual similarities – the car was, like the old 2CV, a genuine and affable weirdo.

The ad campaign also leaned into the weirdness, which I respect as well. Look at these brochure images:

What is that by the Leaning Tower Of Mahal? A steampunk flying chateau airship?

And in this one, it’s a good reminder of how I always forget that Paris is in the middle of a huge desert.

In tone and weirdness, it kind of reminds me of Nissan’s advertising for the Pao, which is a very good thing:

I’m pro-Pluriel. I don’t think all that many people actually are with me on this one, but I’m a sucker for a bold, weird idea. These will be eligible for importing to the US in a couple years, so maybe I’ll get lucky and everyone in Europe will be still sick of these, and be willing to part with them for pimples. I think it’d be a blast to have one – provided I’d really use it in all its many strange forms.

Realistically, something would go wrong and I’d forget to put the roof back together and it’d be full of pine needles in weeks. But I can dream!