Perhaps surprisingly, we have yet to feature a Citroën DS in our Prime Find of the Week slot. They come up for sale reasonably often – after all, the DS was built for a very long time, from 1955 to 1975, with some 1.455m produced, and while the best examples fetch rather more than our self-imposed budget ceiling of £20,000, reasonable ones do occasionally come up for around that figure, and that’s what I think we’ve found for this week.
The DS replaced the long-running Traction Avant, so named because of it’s front wheel drive. For the non-French speaking Brits, the car was christened the Light Fifteen. The TA was – stylistically – a typically 1930’s design, launched as it was in 1934, complete with sweeping running boards and exposed headlamps, and by the mid-1950’s was showing its age.
By the time the DS was announced at the Paris Motor Show in 1955, it had been in development for almost as long as its predecessor had been on sale. It caused a sensation, and when you compare the DS with the TA – or indeed, any contemporary car – it looked like it had been beamed back from the future. 12,000 orders were taken on the first day of the show, a total of almost 80,000 by the time the show ended ten days later.
The Traction Avant, a DS prototype, and the 1955 car that shocked the motoring world.
Nothing looked like it before or since, and it remains a high-water mark of car design, having been voted third in a Car of the Century poll in 1999, and the most beautiful car of all time in Classic and Sportscar Magazine. Iconic is an overused word, but it most definitely applies to the Citroën DS. It comes as no surprise that the DS was styled by a sculptor and engineered by an aeronautical engineer, the two men being the Italian Flaminio Bertoni and Frenchman André Lefèbre respectively.
The DS became a symbol of France, being used as an official transport for French ministers and heads of state, and features in numerous films, perhaps most famously in the 1973 Day of the Jackal, a recreation of the attempted assassination of then French President, General de Gaulle, and more recently several DS’s were transported into the air in X-Men; Days of Future Past, thanks to Magneto’s ability to control metal.
While the DS was only available initially as a saloon, a huge estate version – known as the Safari in the UK – was added to the range in 1958, and a seven-seat version with three rows of seats known as the Familiale. Coachbuilder Henri Chapron created a stunning convertible version – only 1365 were sold and these fetch very strong money nowadays, and he also made a very small number of coupés.
Where does one start with this extraordinary – yet mass-produced – car? The streamlined space-age styling already set it apart. Added to this, the hydropneumatics self-levelling suspension set new standards of ride comfort, without negatively impacting handling and braking, and also enabled the car to be driven reasonably quickly even on just three wheels should the driver suffer a puncture.
Besides the suspension, disc brakes fitted to the front wheels were a first, and the DS came with power-steering as well as semi-automatic transmission. While the early models had slightly exposed single headlights, later versions had dual-headlamps fully-enclosed behind glass covers with the inner pair able to be swivelled via the steering wheel. This was a big, expensive and technically advanced motor car, and almost 70 years later, to see a DS still makes an impact – it’s unmistakeable.
It wasn’t only the exterior that looked different – the interior was equally otherworldly, some would say, wilfully idiosyncratic, with its single-spoke steering wheel, a brake button rather than a pedal, situated between the clutch and the accelerator, no conventional parking brake, but instead a large pedal on the driver’s extreme left and scattered switchgear that wasn’t entirely logically laid out. You didn’t – and still don’t -just hop out of a more conventional car into a DS and simply drive away; you need to learn how to operate it first.
Despite its advanced styling and suspension, however, when launched, the DS – or déesse in French, meaning « goddess » – came with the 1,911cc engine that was effectively the same as the one that powered the Traction Avant.
This unit pushed 75bhp out to the front wheels, not a huge amount to propel such a big car – 16 feet long and 6 feet wide – thus limiting top speed to c.85mph. The introduction of an entry-level version of the car, known as the ID, with even less power – just 57bhp – meant that a car that looked like the future had the performance of the past, but this was rectified in later years, although it was never going to be a car for competing in the traffic lights grand prix.
Nevertheless, the DS was a very successful rally car, winning the 1959 and 1966 Monte Carlo Rallies as well as coming within 100 miles of winning the 1968 London-to-Sydney Marathon, failing only because of a collision with a Mini driven by a drunk driver.
Motor Sport magazine tested a DS 19 over 4,000 miles in 1958, calling it “one of the world’s most advanced cars”, with high praise for its comfort, “outstanding cornering, road adhesion and braking power”, enabling it to maintain very high average speeds despite the lack of brute power.
Alternatives to the DS were many and varied through its two-decade long lifespan; at the time of our Prime Find ie the early 1970’s, they were likely to include the likes of the Mercedes W114, Rover P6, Jaguar XJ6 among others, and fine cars though they all were, none looked as cool as the DS.
As late as 1973, CAR magazine compared the DS23 with the equally advanced NSU Ro80 and more conventional BMW 520 (E12) and despite the French car’s by then 18-year old origins, it still stood up well, not least in performance terms and still rode better than either of the other two.
As I’m sure all ViaRETRO readers will know, quintessentially French as they were, Citroën also built a number of cars in Australia, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Portugal and in Slough, a few miles west of London. Between 1926 and 1966 models including the Traction Avant, 2CV and Ami 6 were manufactured or assembled in Slough, as were a small number of DS’s – I don’t know how many DS’s were made there, but some 125,000 DS’s in total were manufactured outside France.
The DS was treated to a couple of redesigns, principally around the nose; first time in 1962, second time with the swivelling headlamps set behind glass covers in 1967. This is my favourite “look” on the DS, making the car resemble a shark more than ever.
Engine capacity was also gradually increased over the DS’s production life, first to 1985cc in 1965 for the DS20 (as it became known in 1969) as well as to 2175cc in the same year for the DS21, and finally in 1973 to 2,341cc for what became the DS23; the fuel injected version put out 141bhp, making it the most powerful DS.
“Our” DS is a relatively late example and is up for auction with Bonhams as part of their The Market online sales. It’s a DS20 with the 1985cc engine and a five-speed gearbox with column-mounted gear lever, built in 1972 and originally sold to a customer in South Africa, hence it being RHD, where it remained for 48 years, with the dry climate keeping the demon rust at bay. It arrived in the UK in 2019 and was subjected to a considerable amount of work amounting to about £20,000, with the invoices to prove it. The list is extensive and shown in full in the advert, which you can see here.
Despite this considerable outlay the car is far from blemish-free, but it seems to be eminently useable for the new owner to use as is and perhaps improve it gradually in the meantime. It’s finished in dark green and the exterior is probably where the most attention is needed. The interior is a brown tweed and vinyl mix, and again, needs some attention but could be used for some time as is. To be fair, the auctioneers have not tried to hide the car’s deficiencies – there are literally hundreds of photographs in the lot entry, and as per our usual practice, we have borrowed a few.
The auctioneers have given this Gallic classic an estimate range of £17,000 to £22,000, and if it comes in towards the lower end, would represent decent value, I think, bearing in mind it still requires work – excellent examples can fetch nearer the £30,000 mark, more for the DS23 Pallas EFi. While not exceptionally rare in the UK – there are some 425 on the road here – and even less so in France, the DS is so different to look at that it always attracts attention.
It’s a car that comes from a time when the French in general, and Citroën in particular, built extraordinary cars that were nothing like the rest – the DS was just one of number of innovative models the company built, from the DS’s predecessor, the Traction Avant, through the DS, CX, GS, SM and XM. Sadly, today’s Citroëns are far less interesting.
DS’s are complicated, sophisticated cars and a bad one can end up costing a large fortune to put right, so should this DS tempt you, we advise, as usual, that you arrange an inspection if at all possible; the auction is due to start soon.
Postscript – when this piece was written, there wasn’t even an auction start date; it has in fact now been sold – the perils of trying to plan in advance! The price – £19,600.
Thanks to http://www.citroenet.org.uk/ for some of the information used in this piece.
With our Saturday instalment of Prime Find of the Week, we’re offering our services to the classic car community, by passing on our favourite classic car for sale from the week that passed. This top-tip might help a first-time-buyer to own his first classic, or it could even be the perfect motivation for a multiple-classic-car-owner to expand his garage with something different. We’ll let us be inspired by anything from a cheap project to a stunning concours exotic, and hope that you will do the same.
Just remember – Any Classic is Better than No Classic! We obviously invite our readers to help prospective buyers with your views and maybe even experiences of any given model we feature. Further to that, if you stumble across a classic which you feel we ought to feature as Prime Find of the Week, then please send us a link to primefindoftheweek@viaretro.co.uk.