This weeks ad focuses on how innovative a car company Citroen was before it was merged with Peugeot. The two cars shown are very similar to my two Citroens – the Traction on the top and the DS21 below it. They are not quite the same as this is a French made Traction and the DS21 is a Pallas model unlike mine. The ad is a great depiction of Citroen’s two greatest designs. Today Citroens are mostly re-badged Peugeots, but there was a time when Citroen Technology was world leading.
This is a US ad, so the car is shown with US headlights. US headlights were different as archaic laws meant headlights that turned with the steering were not allowed. Nor were lights that adjusted with the suspension. The car in the ad has panel gaps better than any new DS21 ever did!
Citroen introduced front wheel drive, chassis-less construction, replaceable wet cylinder liners, large-amplitude independent suspension system… as far back as 1934… The company possesses and apparently bottomless source of brilliant technical solutions to the rest of the world’s motor industries have either never noticed, or have pretended don’t exist in the hope they might go away.
So there are really only two kinds of cars in the world today: Citroen and the rest.
[…] October 1955, Citroen unveiled one of the most innovative cars ever designed. There have been plenty of new cars that have introduced a new technology, or even […]