Infrequent bursts of fawning published in these pages will prove that the Citroën SM, in its quiet yet revolutionary way, is perhaps the most remarkable automobile ever manufactured. Yet owning one is clearly out of the picture.

Consider: if the engine goes, you’ll have to find a mechanic familiar with 40-year-old carbureted Maserati engines. Then, if anything else goes, you’ll need another mechanic intimate with 40-year-old hydropneumatic Citroëns. If you multiply the respective probabilities of finding such mechanics, you will feel the blood drain from your face.

The nightmarish nature of this scenario is not specific to the United States: contrary to popular belief, Europe does not have trees with mixed bunches of Maserati and Citroën mechanics cavorting on low-hanging branches either.

Yet the SM exerts a powerful visceral tug. Its parts are remarkable by themselves, but the SM is clear testament to the idea that on occasion the whole is indeeed greater than the sum of parts. The strange yet mellifluous 90° V6, the DIRAVI steering, the hydropneumatics, the incredible cabin: the SM’s components combine to make a car that has the ability to cruise in complete comfort at 125 MPH between fillups without breaking down.

Think about that: neither occasional bursts of speed for joy or overtaking nor a single cross-continental blitz with the result of you being on time and your car a smoldering wreck, but a grand tourer for regular grand tours.

The world has since moved on from such earthbound flights of fancy. The SM’s was a world infinitely less hostile to the automobile than ours. Its vehicular contemporaries were:

1. A hypersonic civilian jetliner flirting with time travel
2. A military spy plane made of titanium which could outrun anti-aircraft rockets
3. An air-cooled twelve-cylinder racing car with 1500 HP
4. A giant space rocket which regularly whisked American men from the gravitational pull of the Earth to deposit them on the surface of the Moon
5. The Lamborghini Miura

Yes, wow. That was four decades ago.

Perhaps we should all just forget about the Citroën SM. Ours is a world not of grand tours but of shuffling in socks through airports and molassing along at 65 MPH in plastic cabins.

Yet imagine! Just imagine a contemporary SM.

The Japanese would have to build it. The Japanese are less interested in haphazard, grandiose revolution than in taking established concepts and polishing them to perfection. The way Toyota usurped Mercedes-Benz’s lead in luxury sedans to produce the last word in personal transportation inside motorized whales, the Lexus LS600hL.

But a modern SM is not a Toyota job. In spite of occasional displays of deep petrolhead inspiration—the 2000GT, the AE86, the LFA—Toyota does not make touring cars you’d like to tour in high style in. The modern SM should be a Honda, built on Soichiro Honda’s legacy of mechanical madness and racing chops.

In fact, Honda has already made something akin to a modern SM: the NSX of 1991, a perfect, luxurious grand tourer disguised as a mid-engined sports car and generally mistaken for a Ferrari. Plus, they have taken the SM’s glass headlights enclosure and installed it on the current Civic, which is as close in chutzpah to the SM as a mass-market hatchback can be.

(And it’s not like cooperation between Japanese and French carmakers is such a long shot either. In fact, Citroën already makes a crossover called the C-Crosser on a Japanese platform, the Mitsubishi GS: a base for excellence like the Evo X and also for the abomination that is the Chrysler Sebring.)

Honda could pull it off. As for what our slow world could do with the perfect idea of the touring car executed with Japenese attention to detail, I do not have a clue. But do we really want to go down in history as the generation which has all but abandoned forward motion?

Photo Credit: PlingPlöng/Flickr, afghtiga/Flickr, Infinite Jeff/Flickr, cosmicspanner/Flickr, Ignacio Conejo/Flickr, Jim Ross/NASA, nielsvk/Flickr, Steve Kay/Flickr

Wojdyla's post today on the Aérotrain was the ideal spur to commenter al_beaton, who laid it all out for us in eloquent fashion:

What a miserable bloody world we live in today.

When I was growing up there was Concorde and hovercraft and rocket-powered monorail trains, jet packs, and journeys to the moon.

Now, the new Boeing "Dreamliner" looks just like the last one, which looks just like the one before, which looks just like the one before that, which looks just like a bloody Airbus, which is just a damned TriStar with an engine missing. (Rather than a DC-10 with an engine missing, which is a DC-10 with an engine missing)

Even the Space Shuttle is apparently ready for the scrap heap, and we're going back to launching stuff into space on the back of a firework.

Instead I'm supposed to be grateful because I have a telephone small enough to fit in my pocket, impressed by somebody glueing an ear on the back of a mouse, and delighted because you can get a GM strawberry that's been crossed with a fish so it stays fresh an extra two days.

And French trains still run on rails like Stephenson's Rocket.

I hate the world.

We miss the Concorde, too, and iPhones are no consolation.

It started out as a 1999 Chrysler Concorde LXi, which was presumably minding its own business. But the guys at DiMora Designs, part of a larger coachworks company, lured the the four-door, front-wheel-drive, five-passenger family sedan into their machinists's lair and had their way with it. The result is the JX Coupe, a two-passenger, El Camino-like glossmobile with a covered bed and a 260-hp, 3.2 liter V6 built by ATK. They fused the rear passenger doors permanently to the body and chopped the factory roof so the rear glass assembly would fit. But don't bother asking the price. The company's only built this one as a show car. But if you ask nicely and wave your checkbook over your head in an attempt at semafore, maybe they'll build one just for you. – Mike Spinelli

[via Autocar]

Related:

Press Release:

The DiMora JX Coupe

At DiMora Designs, a division of DiMora Motorcar, we take pride in thinking outside the box to create unique automobiles, yachts, motorcycles, and even entertainment attractions. Whether the need is for a car with a particular capability or there is a desire to carry a thematic style to its logical conclusion, we conceptualize and deliver remarkable one-off creations.

The JX Concept Coupe was conceived for the movies. Often a movie car is a stripped-down vehicle with a desired look, made to fill a particular role in a movie, and it is never seen again except by the prop man or at a museum. But we decided to build this movie car of steel and quality parts, so that it can be enjoyed on the road long after the ending credits roll at the local multiplex theater. This concept car is meant to be driven, not just admired.

The JX Coupe began its life as a 1999 Chrysler Concorde LXi, a four-door, front-wheel-drive, five-passenger family sedan with lively performance from a 235 HP V6 engine.

In late 2006, we decided to make it into a movie car, a two-passenger coupe with the longest trunk in town. It was to have the utility of an El Camino with an electric, lockable lid on the large trunk, and a boost in performance.

Alfred DiMora also decided to use this car to demonstrate the lost art of American coachbuilding in steel during the late 1930s and 1940s. This echoes the steel coachbuilding work he performed at Clenet Coachworks in the 1970s and 1980s. With hundreds of hours shaping the steel, we would add classic style to this typical mass-market car.

In American English, a coupe is "a closed two-door automobile." Since our word comes from the French verb "couper" meaning "to cut", we started the project by cutting up the Concorde! We sealed the rear passenger doors permanently to the body and then chopped the factory roof to accept the rear glass assembly.

To enhance the design of the rear of the car, we replaced the single-outlet factory muffler with a Camaro Z28 dual-outlet muffler. The rear facia was modified by cutting holes to accommodate the chrome exhaust tips.

We replaced the stock engine with a 260 HP 3.2 liter V6 from ATK, which is backed by a three-year unlimited mileage warranty. We added a "Tornado" vortex component to the air intake. MPG was increased 10% and horsepower grew by 10%. We have not had a dyno test on the engine, but we estimate the engine's horsepower was increased to 260.

The unique grille was designed and hand fabricated by Jim Willis, our Concept Car Project Manager. We freshened up the interior then added plush leather seats.

We swapped out the stock wheels for American Racing Euro-Chrome 18" wheels, surrounded by BF Goodrich 235/50ZR18 tires. We used Intrax lowering springs to drop the car an inch and a half in front and an inch in the rear to help give the car a new profile look.

The JX Coupe was completed to better-than-factory-quality using all steel fabrication. The paint is by House of Kolor in San Diego, California, and is called "Sunrise Pearl". This unique paint gives you the illusion of the color changing with the light at different times of the day or with different lighting conditions.

When Jim Willis drove the completed JX Coupe on the open road for its first time, he couldn't help noticing that people were photographing the car with their cell-phone cameras everywhere he went. When he parked, he drew large crowds and people even got up from their meals at restaurants to go outside and look at the car. People approached Jim everywhere he went, asking "When did they start making these? Where did you buy this thing? How can I get one? How much did it cost?"

Well, there will only be this one JX Coupe. But it has already been photographed extensively for CarVision, the premier automotive publication in the Republic of Korea. It was introduced at the Spring Rod Run in Temecula, California, where it was a true crowd-pleaser. You will soon see it on TV and on the multiplex cinema screen. And if you are lucky, you may see the owner driving this one-of-a-kind car with pride for many years to come.

Related:
Think Bigger: The Super Luxury DiMora Natalia SLS2 [internal]