retro
Finding the
Peugeot 403 brochure was nice, but we need a
total overdose of vintage French car brochures! Fortunately,
Mort555 came to the rescue, by sending us a tip about this Dutch site with dozens of beautifully scanned Citroën brochures from the 1950s through the 1980s. France, Spain, Finland, Germany, Italy- if you could buy Citroëns there, the brochure is probably in this site.
[Citrobe.org]
down on the street bonus edition
We always love to see French cars down on the North American street, especially when they're Citroëns.
Chimuel caught this early-70s D Special in Deltaville, Virginia, and had camera at the ready. Note the NASA parking permit.
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junkyard find
Since we're in a Canadian Citröen mood today, let's take a look at this unusual machine that our Canadian friend
Maymar photographed at a junkyard in Ontario. As far as we know, Citröen never made a DS coupe, but Maymar seems to have sleuthed out the likely ancestry of this machine. Make the jump to read his description.
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choose your eternity
The V12 Jagchero vaporized the Electric Renault R10 in
yesterday's Choose Your Eternity voting, but the lopsidedness of the matchup had some supporters of liberty, equality, and eternal torment crying foul. It's bad enough that the British entry was packing a V12 versus the French car's electric motor, but to make a sedan compete against a Rancheroized machine? That's why it's only fair that we have a PCH Superpower rematch today, featuring a more level playing field and one Bargain Hell Project from each side of the Channel.
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choose your eternity
It looks like the Jalopnik readership did some agonized soul-searching and decided to go with the 308/Esprit combo over the somewhat imcomplete 365 at a 7-to-3 ratio in
yesterday's Cheap Ferrari Edition Choose Your Eternity poll. But an Italian car versus an Anglo-Italian 2-fer brings to mind an interesting PCH dilemma: what happens when you pit a geeky-yet-cool Italian car against a geeky-yet-cool
French car? No dreamworld Quattroporte versus SM here; instead it's a pair of cars that don't cost all that much and can even be driven... straight to Hell (i.e., your garage).
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citroen
With all this
talk about Citröens around here, it's sad that I hardly ever get to see them in real life. That's why it was great to discover that there's a shop specializing in Citröen repair in downtown Oakland, just a few miles from Alameda. Commenter
VWMiniSpeedster's great-grandfather opened the shop in 1918, and the family also owned a dealership selling Citröens, Panhards, Morgans, and Lloyds during the 1950s. Nowadays they still fix the old French machinery and have quite the collection on the premises. Make the jump for more photos, a description of the shop's history, and (for you wannabe 24 Hours of LeMons contestants) a chance to get a deal on a potential race car!
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question of the day
From the mind of Davey G... First of all, yes, Herr Johnson and I actually have conversations about things like this. A lot. Constantly, actually. So you can think of this as settling a bet for us. Also, some of you may recall the
last time we put the 308 up to a vote it handily beat out the Lamborghini Jalpa by a 20% margin. But that was then. This time the budget Ferrari is facing the heavyweight opponent of the French automotive scene,
L'Goddess. So, which will it be? Mid-engine or hydro-pneumatic? Single spoke steering wheel or pop up lights? A Malaise Era Ferrari, or the pride of the French nation? And if you want to prevent Questions of the Day like this in the future, email
tips@jalopnik.com with the subject "QOTD" and your suggestion.
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frankfurt auto show
This Citroen XM
Exclusive caught our jet-lagged eye on our way down to the river, where we also caught a glimpse of das boot. The 5-door XM packed a 3.0L 24-Valve DOHC V-6 or 2.5 TD turbo set atop Citroen's signature nitrogen springing - also known as Hydractive suspension. The computer-controlled liquid suspension has a compliance six times greater than suspensions made of
schteel, and is driver adjustable. Had things gone better for this descendant of the mighty Citroen DS, a great deal more mechanics would be troubleshooting hydraulics instead of replacing the occasional strut. We're still looking for a good frankfurter.
fast as a shark
When I was twenty, I studied in Germany. Bonn, to be exact. I had a friend there named Kai who loved techno and had just received his first car, some sort of Citroën hatchback. It was red, and he hoped someday to buy an Audi with an
S in front of its numeral. But at that point, he had what we all ended up calling Kai's
Rote Heiße Citroën des Liebes. I don't remember the model, but a couple of days before I met Kai, I'd seen a 2CV parked on the street. It was covered in bad EKG tape stripes, Laney amplifier decals and sported a giant die-cut
Savatage decal across the rear window. I
knew immediately and instinctively that Kai's car was not a patch on its forebear. Some may decry the
Deuche as a rip of Hitler's Beetle with the drivetrain at the opposite end, but the car that debuted in 1955, spawned an obsessive geek-cult of wack-ass masochists and occupied the opposite end of the French motoring spectrum from the plebeian flip-windowed runabout was about as revolutionary as they came in those days. Having run into a DS on the street a few days ago, I got to thinking. Does the car have a modern-day equivalent anywhere in the world today? And if it
does what could it be? The only answer I could come up with is the Toyota Prius.
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