The Citroën DS: The Car That Arrived from the Future
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On the morning of 5 October 1955, the doors opened at the Paris Motor Show and the world changed. By the end of that first day, 80,000 people had placed orders for Citroën's extraordinary new car. Visitors queued in disbelief. Journalists struggled for words. Nothing remotely like the DS had ever been seen before, and in many ways nothing quite like it has been seen since.
This was not an evolutionary step in car design. It was a rupture, a leap so extreme that the DS still looks startling today, more than seven decades on from its debut.
A Design from the Future
The body was the work of Italian sculptor Flaminio Bertoni, who approached car design the way an artist approaches clay. The DS's teardrop silhouette was not merely stylish; it was aerodynamically coherent in a way that most cars of the era ignored entirely. Every surface flowed into the next with an organic logic that felt less like engineering and more like nature.
The front end was all glass and curved metal, with a detachable fibreglass bonnet that revealed a wide, airy engine bay. The roof tapered to a glassy rear screen. The rear wheels were partially faired over. Even the door handles were unlike anything else, recessed flush into the bodywork. Bertoni called it a goddess, and the French word for goddess, "déesse," gave the car its name: DS.
When you stand next to a DS today, the temptation to reach out and touch it is almost irresistible. It has the presence of a sculpture. Cars designed around the same time look ancient beside it. The DS simply does not belong to the 1950s.
Hydropneumatic Suspension
The body was just the beginning. Beneath it lay an engineering achievement that remains impressive even by contemporary standards: Citroën's hydropneumatic self-levelling suspension. Connected to a central high-pressure hydraulic system, each wheel rode on a sphere filled with pressurised gas and fluid, constantly adjusting to the road surface. The car settled at precisely the right height, whatever the load.
Drivers who experienced it for the first time described something close to disbelief. The DS absorbed potholes, railway crossings, and broken country roads with an almost supernatural serenity. The steering was power-assisted, light and precise. The brakes were disc all round, with a single-spoke wheel and a mushroom-shaped pedal that required only the lightest touch. It was, as generations of motoring journalists concluded, a magic carpet.
If a tyre deflated at speed, the car simply continued. The suspension compensated and the DS remained level and steerable. That was not a minor detail. One day it would prove decisive.
The President's Car
On 22 August 1962, President Charles de Gaulle and his wife were travelling by DS through the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart when gunmen from the OAS opened fire. The car was hit by fourteen bullets. Two tyres were shot out. The driver, Francis Marroux, kept the car under control and accelerated away. The hydropneumatic suspension held the DS stable on two flat tyres long enough for Marroux to escape the ambush at high speed.
De Gaulle and his wife survived unharmed. A conventional car with two flat tyres at speed would almost certainly have spun off the road. The DS, by its very nature, refused to collapse. De Gaulle was reportedly so impressed that he said simply: "Only France could produce a car like this."
The episode became part of the DS mythology, a real-world demonstration that its engineering was not merely clever but genuinely life-saving.
DS, ID and SM: The Family
The DS spawned an entire family. The ID was a simplified, less expensive version that retained the body and suspension but used conventional controls. It found buyers who wanted the looks and the ride without the complexity of the full hydraulic system. Estate variants, called Breaks, were produced throughout the production run and are among the most sought-after classic Citroëns today.
The Citroën SM of 1970 took the DS formula and stretched it into a grand tourer. A Maserati V6 engine, designed by Giulio Alfieri, sat in the long bonnet, driving the front wheels. The hydropneumatic suspension carried over, along with self-centring power steering so sensitive that a light touch was sufficient. The SM was faster, more glamorous, and more complex than any Citroën before it. It was also, in early form, spectacularly unreliable, a handicap that damaged its reputation unfairly. A good SM today is a revelatory driving experience.
The DS itself remained in production until 1975, by which time 1.45 million had been built. Its replacement, the CX, was a very fine car. But it was not a DS.
Goddess Status
In 1957, the French philosopher and cultural critic Roland Barthes published an essay in his collection "Mythologies" about the DS. He wrote that the car had "fallen from the sky" and that it was "superlative in all its aspects." He compared its surfaces to the smooth, unbroken skin of a supernatural being. For Barthes, the DS was not just a car; it was a cultural object that expressed an entire civilisation's dream of the future.
That essay made the DS intellectually respectable in a way no other production car has ever quite achieved. It became the car of architects, designers, philosophers, film directors, and anyone who wanted to signal that their taste reached beyond the conventional. It appeared in French New Wave cinema, in political photographs, in design exhibitions. It was voted the most beautiful car of all time in multiple polls.
Its cultural status has never diminished. When Citroën launched a new DS sub-brand in the 2010s, the original goddess lent her name to a range of cars that, whatever their individual merits, could never be mistaken for her descendants in anything more than name.
Buying a Citroën DS Today
Values have risen steadily over the past decade, driven by design-literate buyers who recognise that the DS is genuinely unlike anything else. A presentable DS19 or DS21 in reasonable condition will cost between £15,000 and £30,000. The late DS23 injection models, with their five-speed gearbox and fuel-injected engine, command premiums. Concours-quality cars, particularly the Pallas luxury trim, regularly exceed £50,000.
The Break estates are the most expensive variants; a good one can reach £60,000 or more. Convertible DS cabriolets, coachbuilt by Henri Chapron, are serious collector pieces and priced accordingly. The SM sits in a similar bracket to the top DS saloons, with Maserati-engined examples attracting buyers from beyond the Citroën world.
Ownership requires patience and a good specialist. The hydraulic system needs regular attention, and finding mechanics who understand it fully is becoming harder. Join the Citroën Car Club and the DS Owners Club before you buy. With proper care, a DS is reliable, usable, and endlessly rewarding, the kind of car that makes every other car on the road look ordinary.
Shop Citroën Art
Celebrate the DS's extraordinary legacy with our British-designed Citroën artwork, available as phone cases, mugs, and prints.
- Citroën DS23 Phone Case — the goddess rendered in bold graphic art, available for iPhone and Samsung
- Citroën DS23 Mug — start your morning with a piece of automotive history
- Citroën DS23 Framed Print — wall art worthy of the world's most beautiful car
Discover more French motoring history in our article on the Citroën 2CV, or browse the full classic car collection for artwork covering the greatest cars ever made.
More classic car spotlights, covering the icons of British, Italian, German, and American automotive history, are published regularly on the KK Automotive Art blog.