Impressive CV

Paying homage to an unlikely icon of automotive design, the Citroen 2CV.

- Ricardo Divila

When one of the design requirements for a car is that the customer should be able to drive eggs across a freshly ploughed field without breaking them, you know some unusual choices are going to be made. Especially if interpreted by an unusually gifted engineer.

In 1934 Citroen went bankrupt, and so Michelin, its largest creditor, took it over. It then did a market survey to see what a low-end car should be able do. France at that time had a large rural population which could not yet really afford cars.

From the results of the survey Pierre Boulanger, the vice president of Citroen and chief of engineering and design, derived the main items for the ‘mechanical umbrella on four wheels’, and listed the requirements for what was called the TPV (Toute Petite Voiture – very small car).

It would be a sturdy, low cost, low maintenance car, more basic than that other icon, the Ford Model T, able to transport four passengers and 50kg of goods across muddy rutted regional roads and not use more than three litres of fuel per 100km (95 miles per gallon). It also had to be easy to drive, for first time drivers.

French persistence

The designer of the car was a mechanical genius, Andre Lefebvre. He had already designed the Citroen 7CV ‘Traction Avant’, a front-wheel-drive sedan that broke new ground in handling, performance and efficacy, turning it into a favourite of bank robbers, because it was the ideal getaway car.

Lefebvre had come to Citroen from Voisin, an aircraft and car manufacturer, where he had designed the Voisin C6 Laboratoire, a grand prix car that was probably the first monocoque racer, bringing his experience as a race and rally driver