I went on Citroen's website the other day and was greeted with an image of great models from the past: the SM, the DS and so on. How times change. Back in the 1980s, Citroen's chiefs had a policy of "Year Zero" – nothing made before the Peugeot takeover in 1974 could be mentioned or even seen. One Citroen employee in Slough was discouraged from bringing in his beautiful Citroen SM to the office as it reminded people that Citroen actually had a heritage. Citroen was under the impression that being a modern, professional company was all about production efficiency and talk about history showed they were "unprofessional".

The policy went to absurd lengths – one magazine got so fed up of briefings about Year Zero that it deliberately mentioned the 2CV in every article about Citroens just to annoy the company.

In recent years, Citroen has woken up to the fact that its heritage is one of its greatest assets - the Koreans can compete on cost, but they cannot compete on history with a company that has been at the forefront of technology for 90 years. Selling heritage can shift the focus away from discounts, and there is nothing unprofessional about that.

In fact, Citroen now has the air that the grown-ups are back in charge. Some of the decisions a generation ago were comedy gold – the Citroen XM was given a foot-operated parking brake because the management thought that, as Mercedes had them, it was a sign of a prestige manufacturer. In fact, it was a sign that most Mercedes were sold with automatic transmission and lots of them went to the USA – neither being factors that applied to Citroens. The other killer feature of the XM was a glass partition between the rear seats and the boot: Citroen managed to convince itself that the main reason people did not buy executive hatchbacks was that opening the boot gave occupants a cold draught. Can you imagine the meeting where that was agreed?

The current plan to create a luxury sub-brand for Citroen called DS (starting with the 2010 DS3) is a brave and imaginative one. Success is not guaranteed, but it is an awful lot more plausible than the decisions that Citroen used to make when it was trying to be "hard-nosed" about everything.

The other killer feature of the XM was a glass partition between the rear seats and the boot: Citroen managed to convince itself that the main reason people did not buy executive hatchbacks was that opening the boot gave occupants a cold draught. Can you imagine the meeting where that was agreed?

Hmmm... I'm not so confident this new tack would actually work.

Take a look at the DS3:


It looks like a cross between a squashed A3 and a Roomster - not exactly a recipe for luxury and innovation...?

I happened to think that for looks, the C6 is the nicest flagship luxury salloon from the standard car makers - the 607 is pointless, the Phaeton completely over-priced and the Vel Satis totally failed.

Risky territory though, and with Fiat and Ford not even doing execs anymore - is there even a market?! But I suppose we should laud the fact that Citroen are at least trying to get back to some radical thinking...

years too early?

this review says that the new 2cv will be the ds2