We’ve repeatedly seen a phrase associated with big Citroën and DS models. In our early reviews of the 9, the company’s people said that success would be measured by selling the car “in hundreds”, rather than thousands, which is almost to the word what they said about the C6 back in 2006.
It is too early to gauge the sales success of the N°8 (European-built this time), but if DS does end up selling it by the several hundred per year here, my flabber will be fairly well gasted.
What do you do, then, if you’re a mainstream car maker who would like to sell premium cars? And it’s understandable that you really would like to, because while the volumes are lower, the profits are much higher.
I recently asked a car designer (who would prefer not to be quoted directly, so I will paraphrase) about what one should do with DS. The first thing to decide, he thought, is what DS should be. Should it be, as it was in the 1950s, a technology leader?
Or ought it do something more prosaic and rerelease some of the old tunes, a new DS in the fashion of a new Mini or a new Fiat 500 (as I think it should)? He said he thought it probably ought to be true to its roots, acting as a tech leader, receiving or introducing the latest stuff that might (or perhaps might not) filter through to other Stellantis models later.
There’s a nobility to that, but I’m not sure that the N°8 does it. The first thing DS’s website calls it is an “electric SUV”, which I suppose may be so it pops up as high as possible in the search engine rankings. (If so, that hasn’t worked: I’m on page seven of my search results for ‘new electric SUV’ and I’ve been past Rivian and Mahindra with still no sign of DS.)
Click the right link and you’re told that you can “experience the pleasure of driving electric, with the simplicity of petrol”, I think because the N°8 has a long range. But it’s a sentence that could have been written for any of a dozen manufacturers.
