Citroën to Show New Concept Later This Year
Citroën CEO Thierry Koskas, gave some insight into the brand’s future direction in a follow-up interview with Autocar — his 2nd this year.
He disclosed that Citroën will continue to make physical concept cars to showcase proposed new models and ideas, and later this year there will be a “new concept that will give direction on how we understand the notion of comfort and space management”.
While the new concept will not directly preview a new model, including a reborn 2CV, Koskas said Citroën “needs to move to series cars” for creating new concepts and ideas as “we do not want to have icons only in concepts that nobody will buy. We want to have real icons that customers will buy”.
Koskas said that the future Citroën range will be built around four pillars: the new C3 and C3 Aircross models and a facelift for the C4, the C5 Aircross, but then indicated that additional models will be launched as part of a plan to be “daring and shocking”. While not specifically saying that a new 2CV is in the cards, Koskas hinted at the same attributes of the original 2CV when it was introduced in 1947. “In the future, we need some iconic models that will surprise, either through their design, their features, or whatever”, he said. “When you travel everywhere in the world, people know the 2CV. We want to use this heritage.”
Koskas said this will be the ceiling for the brand in terms of the size of cars it offers. There is also still no plan for Citroën to re-enter the city car segment with a C1 or C2 model due to “very challenging” issues about making such cars affordable. Koskas believes Citroën “already addresses the smaller car segment” with the affordability of its new C3 while not specifically commenting on the future of Citroën’s micro Ami-electric quadracycle.
Time will tell just how daring and shocking Citroën will be. We can’t help but wonder if the designer and engineers have been to the stash of Citroën’s past concepts from Le Conservatoire, now preserved in a warehouse in Aulnay-sous-Bois and taken a close look at concepts like the C-10 Coccinelle?
