As of December 19th, 2008, Gilles Michel, managing director the Citroen brand, is leaving PSA/ Peugeot-Citroen to run the French government's new strategic investment fund. Michel, 52, has been a rusing star within PSA's upper-management team since joining the company in 2002 as head of platforms; technical affairs, and purchasing. He has run the Citroen brand since 2007, and is a member of PSA's 5-person managing board.

Announced by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on November 20^th, the planned 20 billion euro fund is a key element in the government's plan to defend domestic companies from the economic slowdown and hostile takeovers.

By 2000, Citroen has some 10,000 sales outlets around the world, and is generating 70% of its sales outside France. Despite increased sales, PSA Peugeot/ Citroen reports an 11% drop in net profit for the first half of 2004: 681 million euros versus 869 million euros in the same period of 2003.

Peugeot, like prior Citroen owner Michelin, is coming to grips with a double-edged sword: the expectation.

Known for pushing the boundaries more consistently than most since 1919, Citroen today sees its brand as being synonymous with Innovation; Design; Adventure, and Flair.

Britain's CAR magazine once mused that the public expected innovation from Citroen, no matter how unreasonable it might be to continuously ask one company to move the industry forward. Citroen can regularly be counted on for unique solutions in comfort; roadholding, and stability.

These expectations are seemingly natural demands placed on a company that gave the world:

• front-wheel drive, in 1934
• unibody construction, in 1934
• rack-and-pinion steering, in 1936
• hydraulic suspension, in 1956
• true power disc brakes, in 1955

Citroen's entry-level 2CV; Dyane, and Ami might have been considered somewhat offbeat, and an acquired taste. Yet they sold in high volume, particularly in France.

Citroen is expected to lead potential trends. Perhaps no one might follow; but Citroen itself is certainly not expected to follow others.

Nothing less is needed or desired from the manufacturer whose revolutionary Traction Avant had front-wheel drive in the '30s; whose 1946 2CV put France on wheels with ingenious affordability in the aftermath of wartorn Europe; whose DS (literally, deesse or goddess) was the subject of the poetic adoration of French philosopher Roland Barthes (among others who did not regularly associate with automobilia), and whose SM; CX, and XM looked so otherworldly, yet explored and continue to emphasize the somewhat abstract notion of aerodynamics long before (and, in some cases, long after) anyone else bothered to care.


The brand's engineering-led solutions, including superlative hydraulic suspensions and excellent, if eclectic, ergonomics have seen Citroen dubbed as the quintessential engineer's car.

Citroen's hydraulic suspensions are legendary; perhaps no car is more known for its suspension than is the DS, whose ability to drive on a punctured tire saved the life of General de Gaulle in an assassination attempt. In the early-80s, Citroen produces an award-winning European ad for the CX, showing the car with two punctures driving precisely, and unperturbed, between two semi-trucks which are placed no more than a car-width apart.

CAR magazine, driving the Xantia Activa, writes that it is the perfect vehicle to drive one's mother-in-law around: cornering at speed produces virtually no roll, although that makes the car hard to predict on the track.

The DS and SM feature self-leveling lights that swivel with the steering (a la Tucker Torpedo). Their steering stubbornly returns to the center, whether the engine is running or not. Drivers swear by this trick, and by the mechanism's linearity. Citroen's brakes in this era were always outstanding, if remarkably sensitive. Ergonomics took some getting used to, particularly in the case of the 1974 CX. Once accustomed, however, the driver rarely had to remove a hand from the steering wheel in order to operate the controls.

Before anyone, let alone Citroen, was aware of coefficients of drag, the company leapt on to the map by winning the prize for fuel economy at the 1920 Le Mans race. This achievement ignited Citroen's first full year of production. CX itself is the French abbreviation for coefficient of drag, and the car's teardrop shape - following that of the midsize GS of 1970 - proves a revelation in the focused execution that the aerodynamic discipline requires.

Other manufacturers experiment with the form, but Citroen never gives up on 5-door fastbacks, thanks to the shape's propensity for aerodynamic correctness.

For the C4 of 2004, Citroen claims a drag coefficient of just 0.28; good, certainly, but let's see a C_dA comparison, across the C segment. A car's aerodynamic drag, of course, depends on its frontal area - a factor which can be increased while disingenuously lowering the C_d figure in some cases. Now, the first company to point this out to an uninformed public seems content to follow everyone else's lead in publishing only C_d numbers.

At a time when few others appear to care about aerodynamics, the Citroen C6 flagship of 2005 is a perfect teardrop (given production constraints). There is minimal frontal area; no grille, and a gradual drop-off at the rear.


Peugeot buys Citroen from Michelin in 1974, creating the PSA/ Peugeot-Citroen umbrella. The CX, developed under Michelin, replaces the DS, receiving the Car of the Year award.

High-volume Citroens, however, practice disappointing peripheral differentiation from their Peugeot sisters. The '90s Xsara and ZX; '70s LN/ LNA, and - to an extent - '80s Visa all fall into this class; they're pleasant, but forgettable.


No one much remembers the Citroen ZX. Few miss its replacement, the Xsara, which sold in numbers of just 7,000 in the United Kingdom, for the whole of 2003. "Ford sold twice as many Focuses in June 2004 alone," reports Autocar (Autocar, July 13^th, 2004).

As a result, increasing numbers of European customers view '90s and post-Millennial Citroens as value propositions, their list prices a starting point for bargaining. The C4 of 2004 marks a return to form.

Mainstream Citroens have never been bad cars - both before and after Peugeot control - but, for mere transportation, the public tends to look elsewhere. One is reminded of the widely held view that an Alfa Romeo is a bachelor's car; it cannot - should not - make mere transport.

To change the public's mind, PSA slashes prices on the more humdrum Citroens, only to find that sales are up and profits are down. Increasingly, there is a very real risk of permanently damaging the brand.

Peugeot's use of the Citroen brand does, by and large, not take advantage of Citroen technology. A Peugeot was always a more straightforward vehicle. Nonethelss, for much of the '80s - and, particularly, the '90s - PSA fails to recognize the the potential of the Citroen brand, a vital asset at a time when the European market, the key life-line of PSA, is falling prey to incentives.

PSA and Toyota set up what analyst Koichi Shimizu calls a "European version of NUMMI:" a joint-venture agreement, signed in 2001, which calls for Toyota; Peugeot, and Citroen to produce small, co-developed cars in the Czech Republic ('A Maverick in the Age of Mega-mergers? Toyota's Global Strategies,' Koichi Shimizu, Globalization or Regionalization of the American and Asian Car Industry, Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).

The resulting Citroen - the C1 - is not a bad car; but it is, equally, not a Citroen.

In the days before the Peugeot/ Citroen tie-up, it had all seemed so simple. Mergers were an odd proposition back then; brands were producers rather than just marketing tools, and thoughts of complimentary product lines were hardly at the forefront of anyone's mind.

Yet Peugeot's first step upon claiming Citroen is to pull the plug on the company's U.S. operations. The superlative Maserati-powered SM is too complex for Citroen's sparse dealership network to support in such a large country. "Peugeot killed the SM out of jealousy, crushing some 2,500 completed bodies," writes Automobile magazine, darkly (Automobile, October 2004).

Nonetheless, Peugeot has permitted Citroen to stretch the limits of its patience in the premium class.


The Citroen CX, developed under Michelin, launches unpolluted by Peugeot's ownership. Its successor, the XM luxury 5-door fastback flagship is a superb car, but leaves the lines before the French have discovered the magic of multiplexing. As a result, the XM is best known for sitting dead by the side of the highway, its owners desperately thumbing through Haynes manuals while clutching fistfulls of wiring.

Citroen's new C6 is a far better proposition. It may not have the ultimate prestige to compete with the German juggernaut brands, but it does have more credibility in the premium class than sister PSA brand Peugeot. For all the effort Peugeot has put into its flagship 607, the brand has had problems competing in the luxury market ever since the 604 Turbodiesel departed in the mid-80s.

Meanwhile, counterpart Renault's Avantime and Vel Satis failed in the premium market, as did the Safrane they replaced. Avantime and Vel Satis were hardly pointless exercises; they caught the public's attention, and prepared us for visual changes to the all-important Megane volume model. Yet they could not hope to garner the goodwill that a large Citroen - with its long, enviable heritage of innovative and distinctive predecessors - might.

It is a long wait from the XM's end of production, through 1999 C6 Lignage Concept, to the production 2005 Citroen C6. Yet it is thrilling that PSA has seen fit to deliver a Big Citroen once again.


In the early '60s, Citroen, riding the success of the evergreen DS, enters into an agreement with another industry pioneer, NSU, to jointly develop the Wankel rotary engine. By the '70s, things have begun to unravel. The prospect of rotary Citroens fizzles and dies with a few prototypes, and the company sells its 10% share of NSU to Fiat.

Meanwhile, Maserati - which provides a piston engine for the SM, proves difficult to work with. As Peugeot takes the helm of Citroen in 1974, it has no patience for Maserati.


In 1955, Edouard Michelin's son-in-law Robert Puiseux takes over at the helm, and gives new impetus to the research underway for the DS, the Traction Avant's replacement.


Graduating from France's most prestigious engineering college, the Ecole Polytechnique, Andre Citroen completes his military service and founds his first company in 1902. He acquires a patent for a gear-cutting technique that he has discovered in Poland, which produces gears with chevron-shaped teeth. The new gears work more smoothly and more quietly than contemporary solutions, and transmit power more efficiently.

The shape of these gears provides the inspiration for the celebrated double chevron, the emblem of all vehicles produced by Citroen.

Andre Citroen's first exposure to the automotive industry comes in 1907, when he is brought in to help Mors, a troubled car manufacturer based in Paris. Within a few years, Mors begins attracting customers again, and turns a profit. In seven years, the production of Mors cars has been multiplied eighteenfold.

When Andre Citroen begins to sell cars under his own name in 1919, he is already skilled in volume production methods and automotive technology.

At the 1924 Paris Motor Show, Citroen presents the all-steel B10, a car that revolutionizes the industrial manufacture of bodywork. The production process has been developed by American company Budd, but U.S. automakers consider it avantgarde, and are wary of adopting it. Car bodies have long been built of wood, with metal body parts nailed on. Andre Citroen's willingness to adopt a new way results in parts that are welded to a metal structure.

Andre Citroen has a certain flair for self-promotion, emblazoning his marque's name on the Eiffel Tower from 1925 to 1934, with the help of 250,000 light bulbs. France is happy to oblige; by 1928, Citroen's overseas sales account for 45% of the entire national motor industry's exports.

Into the 1950s, Citroen proves remarkably adept at getting around import quotas. By the '70s, Peugeot control or not, Citroen has set up production agreements in Yugoslavia; Spain; South Africa, and South America. Production in the Eastern Bloc looms on the horizon, too.