41–50 of 115 posts
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It reminds me of Volkswagen “Thing”.
Compared to the beetle it's a tent on wheels. The beetle is quite strong for a car designed in those days.
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The 2CV makes perfect sense if you look at why it was designed: 'an umbrella with wheels'. The Dyane is much better as a car but it was also a bit more expensive and people really loved the 2CV for its lines and thought the Dyane to be too blockish. My second car was a DS (a DS 21 to be precise), I loved it and ended up touring the former east bloc with it (and ended up living in Poland because of it).
Was your DS 21 pre- or post-1968? Basically, did it have the red or the green fluid? I once drove mine from Denmark to Provence and back again, it was an experience, and not without problems (it started to leak around Paris). I am not sure I would make that big of a trip in it again (although, some part of me hopes I will). Since those days, I've mostly made the big trips in my '98 Xantia.
I've done plenty of really long trips with it (many thousands of km), but I did replace all of the accessible high pressure LHM tubing at some point to get rid of the periodical 'Arret!' light on the dash because the system lost pressure. I can also tell you from experience that trying to drive a DS without pressure is both an art and a body building exercise at once.
Xantia is a great compromise between 'modern' and 'old fashioned', a bit plasticy but the one I had I drove into the ground over many 100's of thousands of km. The final nail in that particular coffin was to lose the headgasket somewhere between Munich and NL and just continuing the trip, it even got decent fuel economy but it wouldn't start up after being shut down and once we looked into the engine it was declared a miracle that it made it all the way back. Great car, all around and given the distances covered ultra reliable.
The real problem in the DS model is the semi-automatic gearbox which is super finicky regarding hydraulics levels (you'll notice a ticking sound when it is trying to engage and can't quite make it due to a lack of fluid, you can temporarily fix that under the hood by forcibly actuating it but driving it like that is really not recommended. Nor is driving it when one of your drive shafts breaks and you block up that side of the drive train. Nice low engine revs though, we jokingly called it 'economy mode'.
I also had an ID-19, a simpler but altogether far more robust car.
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The cheapest hatchback still doesn't have that suspension though.
Even in the 1990s, a Xantia would be a cheap way to buy a luxury suspension. Still amazes me that my '74 DS and my '98 Xantia can use the same hydraulic fluid. Even the pressure spheres are interchangeable, although not advisable.
The very worst was the SM, which overcomplicated just about everything. If you open the hood on one you'll have at least six "WHY?"'s going through your head at once, the kicker being the rotating shaft over the top of the engine to drive a pump on the other side of the block.
The Pallas DS was such a beautiful car, they should resurrect it as an eletric car.
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Compared to the beetle it's a tent on wheels. The beetle is quite strong for a car designed in those days.
Compared to a 2CV, I agree; but it was definitely less substantial than the average American sedan back then.
He ended up convincing me to refrain from purchasing the D50 I had my eye on—it was selling for less than three grand at the time, not in mint condition, but with a weathered patina that suited its faded buttery canary yellow just right. The Northeast, he said, given its often extreme weather conditions in winter, uses too much salt to weather driving conditions. I had to be prepared to replacing its chassis in just a couple of years thenceforth, were I to expose it to Boston’s driving conditions.
I wanted that little car to be my every-day commuter here in Boston, it would not have proven feasible to garage it over the winter, so I had to let it go.
In retrospect, having driven in Boston all these years after the fact, not ending up that little car proved a prudentchoice. Cudos to the gentleman Citroen farmer for his sage advice.
Ten or so years ago, being a Citroen enthusiast since I was a kid, but never got around to owning one, I came across a Citroen farm in New Hampshire—about a hundred miles from where I was at the time, in Massachusetts. He ended up convincing me to refrain from purchasing the D50 I had my eye on—it was selling for less than three grand at the time, not in mint condition, but with a weathered patina that suited its fad…