BACK TO THE FUTURE

Packed with leading-edge tech, Mercedes-Benz's EQS paves the way forward as few automobiles can. And yet, writes Jon Wall, it also feels exactly how a traditional luxury car should.

- Jon Wall

When the Citroën DS was launched at the Paris motor show in 1955, it caused a sensation. At that time, just 10 years after the end of World War II, automobile design was still dragging itself out from the 1940s and cars were mostly lumpy, bulbous objects. The DS, in contrast, was a spaceship on wheels, a machine so futuristic and other-worldly that within minutes of its unveiling the company had sold almost 750 of them - and by the end of the same day it had racked up another 12,000 orders, a number almost unimaginable in those days of post-war reconstruction and austerity. According to the philosopher Roland Barthes, who wrote about the car in his 1957 work Mythologies, it looked as if it had “fallen from the sky".

The Citroën wasn't just different in appearance from everything else on the road; it also represented a quantum leap in automotive design, incorporating such revolutionary technology as hydropneumatic selflevelling suspension and headlamps, variable ground-clearance, power steering, hydraulically powered front disc brakes and semi-automatic transmission, all of which meant that it drove and rode like no other automobile in existence. It was even designed around a set of radial tyres, then in their infancy, that Michelin had developed specially for it. In a knowing pun, the initials DS were pronounced in French as déesse (goddess); a later, cheaper and slightly less advanced version took the initials ID, whose pronunciation also meant idée (idea).