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Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

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Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#341

Post by Aurornis »

loeg wrote: post #270
Fiveplus wrote: post #12

The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days. I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked…

Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.

Declining service revenue has been a problem for car dealerships for a long time. EVs are only making it even harder as their maintenance needs are reduced further.

This is another topic where people look back on the past with rose colored glasses. At the risk of downvotes, this happens a lot on HN like in threads where people speak about their pre-SSD era computers as being faster and snappier than modern machines. I recently found my old laptop in storage and booted it up. I remember loving how fast it was at the time and being glad I spent extra for the fastest model at the time, but oh boy was it slow relative to anything I use today.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#342

Post by torginus »

vincnetas wrote: post #319
fpoling wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVs are still heavier than ICE vehicles and will for the next 10-20 years unless one is OK with a tiny battery. And heavy weight means more pollution from wheels that produce particles that ends up in lungs. Note brakes also pollutes with asbestos but EVs typically have regenerative braking so I think brakes pollutes roughly the same in a heavier EV as in ICE car.

My EV is lighter than your ICE. Volkswagen eUP. 1183kg. 250km range in summer conditions.

I love the idea of these tiny EVs. Apparently the EU's making some legislation for them so that they can go without much of the expensive 'safety' equipment such as driver tracking.

Parking cars in cities not designed for them is a nightmare, but getting around with a car is so much faster than public transport, even if your city's is fairly decent.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#343

Post by jijijijij »

testing22321 wrote: post #301
loeg wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.

They’re also vastly safer

* For the driver.

Large cars/SUVs are vastly more dangerous for everyone else. Visibility in modern cars is also much worse, regardless of size.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#344

Post by chihuahua »

jijijijij wrote: post #334
Fiveplus wrote: post #12

The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days. I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked…

> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importan…

Can you give an example of a European city that was "torn down and rebuilt to fit the car?"

In my experience, even cities that suffered a lot of war time damage (Hamburg, Dresden) were rebuilt with every street in exactly the same place with the same narrow width.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#345

Post by alephnerd »

vdupras wrote: post #323
alephnerd wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most guillotined were commoners [0] - not the wealthy nor the intelligentsia. > Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell If France can't fix it [1] after politically powerful billionaires stymied it [2], neither can the US [0] - https://theconversation.com/the-french-revolution-executed-r... [1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/10/31/french-l... [2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-rich…

The statistics cited in the article you cite talks about the Nobility/Clergy/Other classification. There is no wealth-related statistic. It's entirely possible that a good fraction of the "Others" category were wealthy bourgeois.

Even in the height of the revolution, the nobility largely retained it's control [0]. And at the end of the day, le Directorate, the Napoleon regime, the Louis Phillips regime, and the Napoleon III regime continued to maintain the power of the bourgeois.

If the bourgeois had been completely purged in the French Revolution, then the crackdown of the 1848 Revolution (and the subsequent exodus of French republicans and socialists), 18 Bumaire, the Bourbon Restoration, and other successful power grabs by the bourgeois following the French Revolution wouldn't have happened.

Heck, much of the Council of 500 were themselves either mid-level aristocrats or the children of ancien regime enforcers as was seen with Talleyrand, Barras, Duke of Parma, Lebrun, and the Bonaparte family, along with members of the Directorate like Carnot, Barras, and Merlin.

There's a reason Marx termed the French Revolution as a "bourgeois revolution", why Max Scheler classes the French Revolution as a revolution driven by ressentiment (the Nietzchean concept that underlies elite overproduction), and how Bourdieu came to his thesis on "cultural capital" (which can also help explain the contemporary rise of left- and right-leaning populism).

In essence, who is more elite - an L6 at Google earning $600K TC who graduated from UC Irvine and whose parents were union employees, a Senior Editor at the NYT earning $130K TC who graduated from Yale and whose parents were lawyers, or a Congressional Chief of Staff who graduated from UChicago and whose parents immigrated from Taiwan on an H1B to work at Intel?

The answer is they are all members of the elite. It was the exact same with the leadership of the French Revolution, and the subsequent regimes.

It's the same reason why Mao's dad was a rural landlord, why Lenin's dad was a State Councillor, why Ho Chi Minh's father was a Confucian scholar, why Pol Pot's father was a rural landlord with ties to nobility, and Che Guevara's father an Argentine engineer who immigrated from Ireland.

[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#346

Post by jancsika »

Fiveplus wrote: post #12

The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days. I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked…

> modern complexity is the enemy of reliability

There are years-long threads dozens of pages long on priuschat.com with data files posted by wizards just to figure out the 12v charging pattern.

The vehicle itself will probably stop running before any of these wizards ever figure that out, or even understand the algorithm it uses to occasionally run the engine in EV mode.

And yet, I speculate the total runtime of any year of that vehicle will match what you see for the much simpler Citroen C15-- essentially, bounded only by however long the wizard wants to drive it.

Edit: preemptively-- the Prius driver can drive their Prius on roads appropriate for that type of vehicle for as long as they want. Citroen obviously can go more places-- my upshot is just that the glaring complexity of a Prius doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of its reliability as the author assumes it should have.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#347

Post by tavavex »

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #180
kube-system wrote: post #157

> The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US. A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing. The craziest thing about this criticism is that it is phrased as hyperbole but the reality is that this is seen as a small truck in the US. The Ford Ranger actually is the best selling pickup truck in Europe for 10 straight years, but doesn’t sell as mu…

The best part about the F-150 is that it isn't even toddlers at that point. The most common F-150 variant I see in my area's hood goes up to my shoulder and I'm 2 meters tall. You often see the very important people driving these working their way through crowded parking lots and places that are primarily foot traffic with a "Wtach out for ME!" driving style.

It's so funny that when people design vehicles that actually have a need to be big - big buses, commercial vans, fire trucks - one of their common features is that visibility is treated as something important, and often these types of vehicles have either a nearly flat, uniform front side, or they try to minimize the engine compartment hump as much as possible and make the windshield huge. But when we talk about cars that are made for the consumer, all sanity goes out the window, we get these near-caricatures that would be hilarious if they weren't real. The craziness can only be somewhat tamed by government restrictions, depending on where you live, but the peak of this design results in huge, elevated flat boxes for engine compartments, mounted as high as possible. It doesn't matter that the driver has a blind spot in every direction, what matters is showing off how HUGE your 18L V32 engine must surely be under that hood, how powerful it must be to draw air through that chrome grille that's half a person's height, and most importantly, how much of an imposing heroic warrior one must be to own that tank.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#348

Post by oceanplexian »

I love small cars, in fact I owned a Fiat 500 for a number of years and a number of small VWs. With that said, it really grinds my gears (Pun intended) when Europeans want to lecture Americans about large cars.

Our roads are bigger, gas is dirt cheap, parking is plentiful and spacious outside dense metros, and the RAM 1500 I own is 100x more useful no mater how you want to try and spin the facts. I can tow a large trailer with my Jeep on it, a large RV, boats, etc. It is highly capable off roading on technical terrain here in Utah. It’s also insanely comfortable and luxurious on road trips and has enough room to lay on the rear bench seat as if it were a bed. I truly use all of the capabilities in a niche that almost no other vehicle besides a standard size truck occupies.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#349

Post by aweiher »

emtel wrote: post #242
thelastgallon wrote: post #123

The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently: 1) Guillotine for the super rich 2) Nuclear to power >70% 3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house 4) TGV 5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine.

> Guillotine for the super rich Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.

The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.

The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.

It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.

Re: Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

#350

Post by everdrive »

This is pretty tiresome, however the article is mostly correct. If I could get one of these and own it and drive it in the US, I would. I certainly don't want an over-expensive, over-weight, over-featured monstrosity, but that's all anyone sells in the US.
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