The car that landed like a spaceship.
The Citroën DS was revealed at the Paris motor show in 1955, and the crowd reacted the way people react to something that should not yet exist. The company took around twelve thousand orders on the first day. Beside the upright, chrome-heavy cars of its moment, the DS looked as though it had descended from somewhere else, low and smooth and aerodynamic, its body shaped by a sculptor rather than an engineer, tapering like a drop of water.
It drove like nothing else too. Under the beautiful skin was a hydropneumatic suspension, a system of pressurised fluid and gas that let the car glide over broken roads as if they were glass, self-level regardless of load, and rise up off the ground at the touch of a lever. Passengers used to being jolted found themselves floating. It felt less like being driven and more like being carried.
The philosopher Roland Barthes was so struck by it that he wrote a short essay comparing it to a great Gothic cathedral, an object that seemed to have fallen from the sky, consumed by the public with something close to religious feeling, magical precisely because it hid all its complicated machinery behind a serene and perfect surface. That is exactly the trick of it. Ferocious engineering, invisible, wrapped in calm.
It stayed in production for twenty years and never stopped looking like the future, which is a strange and telling thing. Most cars are dated the moment the next model arrives. The DS was so far ahead of its own time that the present spent two decades catching up to it and never quite did.
The lesson is about the courage to not look like everything else. Citroën could have built another handsome, conventional saloon and sold it perfectly well. Instead they let their designers imagine, from scratch, what a car could be if it owed nothing to what a car had been, and they built that. The result outlived every safe car released alongside it.
What would you create if you refused, completely, to resemble everything that came before it?
