There’s a subtly and sophistication in the great, grand design of the DS that makes so many contemporary attempts at stylish automotive pennery look sophmoreish in the extreme.

When thinking about the goddess, though, we can’t help musing about what a brilliant addition to anyone’s life an estate version would be.

Apparently the stretched version of the DS was known as either the ‘Safari’, ‘La Familiale’ or plain old ‘Wagon’.

But whatever you named it, there was a grandeur to the vision of the DS that had everyone from the man in the street to high falutin’ philosophers like Roland Barthes frothing at the mouth.

We can see what all the fuss was about.

So much was changed by the vision of the designer of these amazing cars — and to this day they can turn heads and take the breathe away.

Of all the interesting stumble-upons that we have, er, stumbled upon recently, we think this beautiful little set of drawings is up there with the best.

Published in France some time in the 1960 the book is a a nice example automotive art before the Apple Mac came and swept pen and crayon aside forever.

We haven’t been able to find much in the way of info about who author or publisher might be. Perhaps some of our readers who fetishise automotive ephemera might be able to help with that.

We reckon this pre-digital showcase of line and colour has a colourful vibrancy and fascinating appeal that is lacking in a lot of the contemporary stuff…

thanks to The William Brown Project

On the day that the world finally gets to read journalists’ first hand accounts of what the new British supercar is actually like to drive (see Influx writer Ben Oliver’s splendid account of hanging with the MP4 12C and Jenson Button here) we thought we’d focus on an incredible piece of Franco-Latin artistic imagineering , rather than the genius piece of passionate engineering released today from the boys at Woking. Call us contrary, but there you go.

Gabriel Orozco is a sculptor who’s a bit on the whacky side. He likes to take everyday objects – cat-food tins, yoghurt lids etc – and alter them, ever so slightly, to reveal something different about them: to find a way of seeing.

Take his Citroën DS that he sliced into thirds and removed the centre to exaggerate the little Sixties motor’s stream lining. Why? Because as a child the artist – seduced by racing and fast cars – imagined that any car could be faster if only it were a little thinner.

In the way of all artists this piece is shrouded in layer upon layer of context. DS is pronounced déesse, meaning goddess in French. The result is a sculpture that is at once clunky and sleek, in limbo somewhere between Noddy’s ride and a lightening quick aerodynamic Formula 1 car.

Curious? Pop along to London’s Tate Modern to witness the beautifully spliced freak before April 25.

West coast designer surfer Shawn Stussy has made a veritable industry out of hip-hop favoured steez. But he has also been known to be an aficionado of coolness when applied to cars.

His well viewed blog has for a long time now been a regular go-to when trawling the WWW for interesting material. But we had to make extra special note when we came across the great man’s latest line of T-Shirts.

Might be too late for Christmas lists by now, but hunt these beauties down if you want to represent you passion for motors.

Hold the front page! This weekend French savant Sebastien Loeb won the final stage of this year’s WRC in the Forests of Wales.

It may not be exactly a surprise, but it is fitting that the man who has dominated the sport’s current formula should finish the season on top — because the two litre turbocharged setup that has been at the forefront of world rallying is to end this year.

The changes are detailed at the WRC’s site here.

Beyond the technogeekery, it seems that the changes are not exactly revolutionary, to say the least.

If only, though, the FIA would bow to every petrol head’s secret wish — and bring back the brutal and dangerous group B phenomena that characterised the sport’s spectacular apogee in the 1980s.

We can’t corroborate our claims that the reintroduction of the no-holds-barred formula would represent universal appeal and put the sport at the forefront of things once more — but we reckon there is a massive constituency of folk out there who would love a return to balls-out bonkersness.

After all, without a modicum of danger, and a whiff of brutality, isn’t motorsport a contradiction in terms?

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m not the greatest lover of motor shows. They’re all titillation and no consummation. I’ve never really understood their appeal in the same way I don’t get strip clubs. Just looking at cars is the same as looking at an attractive member of the opposite sex; very pleasant, as far as it goes, but you only get about ten per cent of the pleasure that should be had.

And it may be also that motor shows will wither away. The British show was once one of the most important but has effectively died off. Even the mighty Detroit, Tokyo and Frankfurt shows have been clobbered by the recession: non-attendance by a big carmaker at one of those was once unthinkable, but as the recession struck they bailed out in such numbers that last year’s Tokyo show was almost cancelled.

But it’s superfast broadband that might finally kill the motor show. Why would you travel for hours to a grim part of town to traipse around a draughty exhibition hall when you’ll be able to download hi-def, 3D renderings of the latest models which you can configure with your choice of colour and trim, look at without the backs of other people’s heads getting in the way, and then get into (virtually), start up and drive?

But if one show survives, I hope it’s Geneva. For a start it’s five minutes’ walk from the airport, so you can Sleazyjet in from anywhere. Second, it’s small enough that your feet won’t hurt by the end of the day. Third, despite the size, all the major carmakers and lots of insignificant but insane ones are here: nobody bails on Geneva, yet.

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I’ll get to the important cars of this year’s show in a moment, but those tiny, loopy tuning firms alone make Geneva worth the trip. You’ll see stuff you just won’t see elsewhere; really outrageous cars that it would be completely unacceptable to launch anywhere else. Thought the flagrant, aggressive SUV was a thing of the past? Oh no. Maybe it’s because Switzerland is neutral territory and non-EU that Hamann feels safe revealing its Range Rover Sport-based Conqueror II, or its BMW X6-based Tycoon Evo M. Carlsson brought its €429,000, 735bhp, Mercedes SL-based C25, whose environmental impact will be limited only by the fact that just one will be supplied to each of 25 countries. Swiss tuner Mansory has somehow managed to get hold of a Rolls-Royce Ghost already and pimped it with a shocking electric blue and gold paintjob, which looked even more garish alongside its more subtle but otherwise entirely pointless carbon-fibre bodied Mercedes G-wagen.

Ugliest was probably the Malaysian-made, V8-powered Bufori Geneva limo: slogan, ‘A Statement of Pride,’ though ‘a statement of staggering bad taste’ might be more truthful. Who in their right mind buys these things? Is Switzerland so awash with idle cash that these excrescences are needed to soak it up? Even Bentley wasn’t immune, displaying a foul purple-and-cream Continental.

The design houses like Giugiaro have always used Geneva to show their own work, unfettered by the restrictions of a commission from a big carmaker, and these cars are another good reason for coming. Pininfarina’s take on an Alfa spider is bewitching; Bertone’s Pandion, a variation on the same theme, more challenging. But you’ve never seen anything like the Pandion’s rear grille: a mad, asymmetric jumble of spikes, somewhere between a porcupine’s quills and broken glass. This is proper, free-thinking car design; you wonder if a big carmaker would have the balls to put it into production.

There were some great-looking cars from the major makers, though. The show-stopper was unquestionably Porsche’s 918 Spyder. It was a genuine surprise; when the covers are whipped off new cars at motor shows they have almost always been leaked in advance or shown to car magazines so they can put them on their covers in time. But this was a genuine shock: a plug-in hybrid supercar with over 500bhp and a 3.2sec 0-60mph time, yet returning 90mpg and 70g/km of CO2. Those figures are greener than a Prius, and Porsche is not in the habit – unlike some other car firms – of making claims it can’t prove. For once, looking was almost enough; the 918 manages to appear compact, delicate and light but raw and aggressive all at once. It also looked bored on that stand; bored being looked at when it’s built to be driven. And you just know it will be incandescent to drive.

The most significant car of the show is probably Audi’s A1, because it sits at the nexus of a series of interconnected trends. Audi is on a roll, despite the downturn. People want cool small cars again for a bunch of reasons and they want a premium badge. The Mini better watch out. Ford showed its new Focus, more significant than the A1 in terms of numbers, but the looks are a little Korean and you just know it will be more of the same from Ford; great dynamics, great quality, and a car that doesn’t treat the ‘ordinary’ driver like a schmo.

Alfa’s new, Focus-sized Giulietta was much better-looking, but like I said, the looks are only ten per cent of the appeal.
Elsewhere, like every other motor show for the past two years, pretty much every big carmaker had some sort of electric/hybrid/whatever concept on display, but there’s a big difference between just saying your new concept runs on manure and emits only butterflies, and actually putting an appreciably greener car into profitable mass production.

And like every other motor show, Geneva’s halls are crammed with car-anoraks festooned with cameras and laden with brochures, with the garishly-dressed and bouffanted ‘valued clients’ being buttered up by the more exclusive carmakers (so that’s who buys a Bufori…), with teams of Chinese engineers taking digital pictures of obscure parts of the latest models, and with the angular, architectural, intimidatingly beautiful stand-girls.

I’ve never quite understood this either; if a carmaker wants us to look at its new model, why does it distract us with beautiful women wearing very little? And why does the car industry continue to get away with a ‘marketing’ tactic that should have died off at the same time the Miss World contest was taken off TV? Maybe there’s a parallel with motor shows in general; maybe predictions of their demise are premature. A few more will die off, certainly. But if you don’t mind just looking, go to Geneva.

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Stare into the crystal ball. The motoring industry tugs us in two directions. On the one hand it fuses the heights of driving passion, design discernment and technological exactitude to produce the most dizzying hypercars of which we could ever have dreamed.

On the other meanwhile, that same passion and techno-savvy explores new ways of powering, driving and being on the road.

Somewhere in the middle lay the worse of marketing-led product launches and misguided nods to trend. Meet our heroes and villains of the next 12 months.

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Citroen came to London last week to show off their GT concept which had been designed for the new Grand Turismo ‘street circuit’ featured in Gran Turismo 5 – the new PLAYSTATION 3 driving game.

The virtual-turned-reality supercar ‘swapped pixels for Piccadilly’ as put lovingly by the Citroen Press Office, as it swept through the world famous circus, toured Regent Street, rounded Trafalgar Square and cruised down the Mall past Buckingham Palace.

The result of a partnership between Citroën and Sony Computer Entertainment, the GT by CITROËN concept measures nearly five metres long and just over a metre high with a wire-frame design featuring rear air-diffuser, horizontal LED headlamps, gull wing doors and diamond-effect 21s.

The cabin offers “a refined racing experience” with copper, steel and black leather finishes combined with hi-tech racing controls.

Now, according to reports in the mainstream motoring press Citroen has decided to put the GT supercar concept into limited production.

The project was believed to have been given the green light last week by the company’s product boss Vincent Besson. Only six Citroen GTs will be made, and rumour has it that the car will cost around £1.1 million pounds.

Virtual reality has begun to play more and more into the hands of the real-time engineers of existence.

Shame the stratospheric price tag makes it about as likely that you will drive the GT as you will upload yourself into the Playstation and win Gran Turismo in a 512 BB.

Fans of French cars are usually pretty easy to spot. They’ll be the ones leafing through a car magazine or hanging around a Peugeot, Citroen or Renault dealership with a look of mild sadness and disappointment on their faces. New French cars have been, on the whole, pretty disappointing for all of us in recent years, but particularly for French car nuts whose loyalty remains undimmed, and who still believe that France will give us another DS or 2CV (below). We all hope it will.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why do French cars attract such loyalty? Mainly because the best ones meld a set of really appealing attributes. First, a good French car is affordable; sold at the kind of price we might all reasonably afford. Even the bigger, more expensive good ones — the DS, the CX – weren’t unobtainable, and if you couldn’t afford it at first then the staggering depreciation big French cars suffer meant you soon could, until it became a classic and the price rocketed back up.

Second, a great French car should be an innovative, idiosyncratic piece of design. Both its architecture and its engineering detail should display the kind of left-field free-thinking you want to buy into and be associated with. It should look striking and fresh, but doesn’t have to be beautiful.

Third, it should be practical. With a few admirable exceptions, a good French car can be your only car; its design smarts should make it easier to use every day, and much of the satisfaction of owning one comes in the slow revelation of how well it fits your life. It was only after a couple of months of Kangoo ownership that I realized the big plastic cupholder in the boot was designed to take a wine bottle, and picnics were instantly slightly better as a result.

Lastly, it should, of course, be great to drive. Not immensely powerful; in fact the best ones often have the least grunt. Instead it should goad you to make the utmost of whatever power it has, with lightness, quick steering, a fluid ride and grip that gives way progressively, and, ideally, at the back first: the Peugeot 306GTi-6 is the absolute master of this.

And there’s also a bunch of stuff a good French car needn’t be or have. It won’t rely on a snooty badge for its appeal. It doesn’t need a cabin trimmed in oak and veal-skin, or stuffed with more gadgets than Dixons; in fact a little roughness-round-the-edges is kind of desirable.

There are a few French cars that reflect all of these values and which everyone knows: we’ve already name-checked the Citroen 2CV and DS; you’ll know the Peugeot 205GTi and the Renault 4 too. Others might not be as familiar; if you don’t know the Citroen Traction Avant, the HY van or the Mehari (below), Google them and prepare to be charmed.

So if the qualities that make a great French car are so clear and bright and simple, why isn’t every French car great? Because assembling a car that hits all of those bases is deceptively hard, and getting harder. It’s tougher to be truly innovative now than forty years ago when so many more cars have been made, so many more ideas already tried, and so many restrictions placed on how a car should crash, and therefore be built in the first place.

It’s also hard to defy the trend towards bigger, heavier, better-equipped, more solid-feeling cars, led by the German marques. The relative recent success of the French and German car industries makes it clear what most buyers want. But the majority aren’t always right. Sadly, when it goes chasing them and tries to build a German car the French car industry is at its worst. See the Renault Safrane and Peugeot 607 for evidence.

But let’s not get too downbeat. Every so often, the French car industry still produces an utter corker. (Well, Renault does, anyway: since Citroen was swallowed up by the more pedestrian Peugeot in the ‘70s its design and engineering genius has been suppressed.) In the eighties, Renault created the people carrier with the Espace. In the nineties, it created the mini-MPV with the launch of the Scenic. Both created whole new market sectors, left their rivals racing to catch up and made literally millions of family’s lives easier. This decade, Renault has produced a series of scorching hot hatches. It currently offers the Clio 197, described by one magazine as ‘the Porsche 911 GT3 of the hot hatch world’, and the utterly insane and barely legal Megane R26R, with its roll cage, plastic windows and semi-slick tyres. Can you see Volkswagen building something similar? Not really.

Renault has also, to its credit, tried really, really hard in recent years to produce a truly original car but ended up going way too far. There was the windowless Sport Spider and two versions of the mid-engined Clio V6, which was hilarious to drive but a little too eager to swap ends in the wet. There was the Vel Satis executive saloon, which tried so hard not to be a BMW 5-series, and ended up with a great interior but weirdly contorted styling as a result.

And there was, of course, the Renault Avantime (above), that mad coupe-meets-MPV with two doors, four seats and awesome views through its long pillarless side windows and moon-roof; it wasn’t great to look at, but it was glorious to look out of. There had never been anything like it before, and given how badly it was built and how poorly it sold, there never will be again. It was exactly what fans of French cars like me thought we wanted, until we got it.

But there’s hope. Renault has just launched the new version of the Kangoo (below), which may be a little better-padded than the old one but is still the clearest carrier of French car DNA. Don’t be fooled by the fact that most are driven by mad old ladies with dogs: Gordon Murray, creator of the McLaren F1, has two.

Renault also has radical electric-car plans, and is bringing its low-cost, five-grand and surprisingly good Dacias to more western European countries, and maybe eventually the UK. For economic and environmental reasons, the world is coming back around to the idea of affordable, practical, light, frugal and fun cars: France just needs to start making more of them.

Francophilia is a common, if perhaps unexpected thing in these islands. Agincourt, Norman invasions, and centuries of general and endemic antipathy between France and Britain hasn’t diminished the reality that we have a grudging admiration for many things French.

“We started specialising in French cars because basically because we had Citroens. People at the time were scared of them,. “ Tony Williams tell me. Tony is co-proprietor of Paris Retro, a garage in the Somerset town of Temple Cloud specialising in all things French (as well as being dab-hands at anything on four, or two wheels for that matter).

“We can do anything from full restorations from the ground up of classic DS models, all the way through to simple day-to-day maintenance of everyday cars.”

The Paris Retro yard is litterred with mouthwatering examples of Citroen’s groundbreaking ‘goddess’ in various states of order.

“We have had a particularly great number of DS lately. The thing about them is that they are relatively simple to work on, despite people being afraid of the hydraulics.”

The prevelance of air suspension and electronic trickery is one of the the things about French cars that have made many British engineers turn sneerily up at the French fondness for super-mechanical jiggery pokery amongst French cars. But the fear is pretty much unjustified.

“French cars are built along the same principles as any other vehicle, “ he tells me, “ and Hydraulics are just a line. And what’s more, even though the design of the DS is around fifty years old, it remains a beautiful, practical and relatively fuel-efficient car.”

According to the expert, many of the examples of DS he has seen lately continue to reach around 30 MPG if they are treated right.

“And there’s one thing that remains true about Citroens is that they are a great ride.”