Really THAT Unreliable!? Is The Citroen DS as Bad As The Internet Says It Is!?

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[jeffk]

You know that Citroën nailed it when you think that nearly 70 years after its launch, the DS still looks like it comes from the future...

[cliorsminicup]

As a French I'm impressed to see the knowledge and perfect vision of the history of the DS by this US owner. 👏 Yet another proof that the true enthusiast has no borders.

[illiacherniaiev]

You can tell that this man LOVES the car. So much so that he sometimes needs to stop for air because one breath is not enough for him to express his passion for the vehicle.

[pierrecollet]

A couple more informations from a Frenchman who learnt driving on my parent's 1973 DS23 and still owns it...
First of all, thanks for this great video. One of the first American ones where all that is said is 95% right ! :-)

A small remark : your DS is really beautifully clean. You take care of it really well 🙂
However, your doors don't seem to be well adjusted. The 3 vertical gaps between the doors and the body parts should have the same width.

The air intake for the engine is not the horizontal slit under the boot cover. The air intake is under the car (you can see it if you lift it). It is 2 big massive holes that go directly under the leatherette protection that is under the spare tyre. You can open the leatherette with a zipper to increase the amount of air that goes in the the summer (it also has an electric fan that starts automatically if the car is overheating, like in modern cars).

One more thing concerning the rear brakes. The rear brakes are drum brakes that are powered by the hydraulic system. They are powered in a feedback loop with the oil pressure coming from the independent suspension from each wheel. If you get into the car and lift it up, if you press on the brakes, the rear wheel will still turn because there will be no weight on them. This is done so that the rear wheel don't lock up to prevent you from spinning around if you brake hard while turning (as the weight is transferred from the back to the front, the rear wheel brakes will lower their grip on the wheels). If you could brake so hard as to lift the rear wheels off the road, they would then turn freely as they would not be braked anymore. The braking force applied to the wheels is proportional to the weight they bear.

Also, you didn't mention that if you completely lose the hydraulic pressure, you can still brake the front wheels with the special parking brake that is the left-most pedal that operates on the FRONT discs by using cables. This foot-operated "handbreak" has a little switch on the bottom of the release handle. In its normal operating position, when you press on the pedal, the pedal stays where it is and you can only release the brake with the handle.

However, when you operate the little switch at the level of the handle, you prevent the pedal brake from engaging, meaning that you can use it as a standard brake to operate the FRONT brakes, should your hydraulic system go belly up. You can still brake the car and drive back home or to your garage in limp moe.

Concerning the "climate" controls, they are quite intuitive if you look at the markings. You figured out the bottom one (hotter to the left, cooler to the right... they simply operate flaps in the airbox behind to get what you want). The higher one on the left is for having air directed on the feet or on the windscreen (triangle pointing down on the left, triangle pointing up on the right). The higher one on the right is the amount of air input. The four dashes above the command - - - - are not the same size... They are smaller on the right and larger on the left, meaning that if you put the lever on the left, you get more (cool or warm) air into the cabin, and if you put it on the right, you can close the air intake from the engine bay.

Note that the dashboard vents have 2 vents : a smaller one on top is where the heated air would come from the engine bay (controlled by the levers we just talked about above). The big square air vents are only connected to outside air that is not circulated around the engine. They are quite intuitive to operate.

There is also a potentiometer under the steering wheel to control the brightness of the dashboard at night.

And yes, the right-most button is defrost (if your car is equipped with rear heated windscreen. You can see it if it has horizontal heating conductors through it). It is quite effective.

At minute 31 you say you don't know how the car keeps "horizontal". It does not. However, it maintains the same body height respective to all wheels. For this, there is a small lever at the level of each wheel. If the wheel is too low, the lever will point low and will decrease the hydropneumatic pressure on the corresponding wheel. So however you load the car (front, rear, left, right) the body height will be maintained thanks to these little levers (that are mechanical sensors that implement a feedback loop, like a thermostat would start your heater if the temperature in your room was too low, but here, they are analogic and not binary like a thermostat). It is also thanks to these sensors that the car will not dive when you brake... When the front dampers compress, the car would dive, but this lowers the rear levers / sensors that would reduce the pressure on the wheel arm so the rear wheels will go down too. So when a DS brakes sharply, the whole car goes down horizontally (it doesn't dive).

Ah, concerning the headlights, you mention that the swivel left to right, but you don't mention that they also swivel up and down so that the beams stay parallel to the road if the front of the car dives due to a vertical acceleration cause by engaging into a slope. So not only will the headlights allow the drive to look into bends, but if you engage at speed into a slope, the front wheels will go up into the body and.. the headlight will also go up. The light beams are always parallel to the road, independently of the body attitude.

I also wonder if you have the standard car mats (they don't look the same as in France). They are quite special. They are very thick underneath and made of latex with conical holes that are designed to absorb the road noise. If they are standard mats you bought in a car shop, you may want to source original ones to reduce the road noise when driving.

Concerning the suspension, you are not supposed to drive it in lower or higher setting, except to change your wheels or get out of a bad situation (snow, etc). In fact, the suspension has a maximum displacement (read "comfort") when the lever is set in the middle. On Min 33.50, you say there are 3 different positions but these are operating positions. in fac, there are 5 🙂

You demonstrated the top one where the car goes completely up. When you are there, you lose your suspension as the wheels are forced at their maximum extension, so they can't go up or down anymore. This is how you can do the 3 wheels trick : no suspensions, if the center of gravity is inside the triangle, the car will not flip to its rear missing (left or right) wheel. It's simple physics.

Then, there are three markings as well seen at 34'. The lower one is the comfort operating position. The two higher ones are operating position for rough roads where you would like a little more clearance but if you still want suspension. It would be the preferred positions on a dirt road. The further away you go from the center, the more suspension you lose. So the higher of the three will be the less comfortable, the one slightly under will mean that the car will be slightly lower but more comfortable and the bottom one is the standard one.

And there is the 5th position down there that you can access if you push the lever to the right while pushing to the complete bottom. When you do this, the car flattens down to the ground and (as with top position) you lose again the suspension because the wheels are completely "up" (meaning that the body is down). This is the position where the wheels go up when you put the truss under the car. You are not supposed to drive in either the top or the bottom position because without suspension, you risk damaging the car chassis if you run at speed on bumps on an uneven road.

If you want to have a good laugh, check out the "Buying this weird 1969 Citroen ID 19 was a total disaster. I am so DUMB!" youtube video. Indeed, at 17"46, Dumb puts it in the lower position in the hope to enjoy the smooth ride he was expecting from the DS... The video should have been renamed "Dumb and Dumber buy a 1969 Citroen ID". Fortunately, the mechanic is the more intelligent of the two and despite not opening the user manual or trying to read about the car before trying to understand it, he makes out that he may be on something valuable and had an open mind on it, leading to better other videos from his Car Wizard youtube channel. In French, we call this feeding pigs with jam. Made me think a lot of the great "Taliban Workout At Gym In Kabul’s Presidential Palace" youtube video...

The horn indeed has 2 settings : when you press it lightly it is a "nice" one-tone "city horn" and when you press harder, you engage the "highway" horn, which is a really unpleasant discordant two-tone horn, tuned to curdle the blood of truck drivers who would cut in front of you. (we see your ears cringe when you go into the two-tone mode, showing that it works as designed :-)

At 36'20, you say that the controls are on the driving column in a modern way even though this dates back to 1972. But 1972 was 2 years before DS stopped being made! The controls you have in front of you came out on the DS in 1955, not 1972 !!! If you look at what cars were looking like in 1955, you will see how modern this is.

You also didn't mention that DS were some of the best really cars winning :
Monte-Carlo in 1959,
Corsica in 1961
1000 lakes in 1962
Corsica in 1963
Monte-Carlo in 1966
Portugal in 1969
Morocco in 1969, 1970, 1971
Wembley-Munich in 1974

Hope that the little details I added helped.

Great video that I really enjoyed !!!

[atariandre]

Being from Europe, this video was simply fantastic ! We're pretty used to seeing DS'es kind of regularly here (The Netherlands) and I knew about a lot of its special features but I learned a LOT more from this video. I love how detailed it is and the absolutely very best feature is Kevin because he shows so much love for, and knowledge about the DS _and_ is able to talk about it understandable, enthusiastically and entertainingly ! To top it off, he knows how to pronounce aluminium correctly so this guy scores on all points possible :)

[user]

When the DS was presented, an author wrote in an article „This is not a car from the future. It is from today. All the others are from yesterday.“ Well said.

[jeanbalthazar]

As a French guy who already knew most of the info that was given in this video, and without being a particular fan of this model, I still watched all of it just to listen to this gentleman talk about his car. A real pleasure. Thank you.

[Человек-фжм]

As a car mechanic myself, I am indeed shocked how this car is complex and simple at the same time. Hydropneumatic suspension may sound complicated and difficult to maintain and repair but as I see any mechanic can do it. Not a car but an engineering masterpiece.

[briantitchener]

This has to be the best DS video in YoutubeLand. So interesting and factually presented. The Citroen suspension was so smooth that Rolls-Royce used the same system on their 1965 Silver Shadow. They produced it under licence from Citroen. Tells you how special the DS was, --light-years ahead of the competition. Great cars. If only people could buy them new today.

[hatbpto]

It is said that in Heaven the lovers are Italian, the policemen are British, the bankers are Swiss, the mechanics are German, and the chefs are French. But in Hell the lovers are Swiss, the policemen are German, the bankers are Italian, the chefs are British, and the mechanics are French.

[lucrolland]

In 1956, the French had the coolest tech: Citroen DS, trains rolling at 100 mph, Caravelle jet airliner and Alouette helicopteres and soon the superb Mirages. They were really ahead of the game.

[jfb_ventures]

We had DS's from the sixties until 1973. You cannot explain how comfortable it is to those who did not experience it.

[rustyturner]

I managed a dealership that sold Cits in the early-1970s. The cars were quirky and fascinating, but VERY reliable and innovative. For instance, early DS cars with a/c had an evaporator pipe that was routed AROUND the car, not placed in front of the radiator! The main problem with Cits was that there were very few dealerships, and fewer certified technicians. We had customers who drove literally hundreds of miles to bring their cars to us, and those owners were almost all fastidious about maintenance. And they were LOYAL; when the word got out that the DS wasn't coming to the US any longer and the CX was not even being considered, we were inundated with owners who wanted a new one. I scoured the whole county and bouoght every one I could, but we still fell short. If Citroen had concentrated on the sedans and not the SM, they would have been a lot better off (very few DS owners were interested in the SM). I still have a DS23 Pallas that I imported myself as soon as I could, and it performs beautifully as my daily driver.

[MouradMokrane]

A huge Thank You to Kevin for sharing his passion for this beautiful car. He's a remarkable storyteller, and it's been a pleasure listening to him!

[deniswauchope]

When I served in the USAF back in the late '60s, I had a Citroen ID19 which I drove all through Europe. It was by far the most comfortable car I've ever owned; mine had a 4-speed column shifter & a lot of people thought it was an automatic because it shifted so smoothly. The interior was all lined in foam rubber under the carpeting, so it was quiet as a Rolls.

If I didn't live in N. Texas, where it gets hotter than Hades in the summer, I'd love to have a DS21 (but I'd have the 5-speed shifter!) One thing that didn't get mentioned in this video: it's the only car I've ever had where you could have the driver's side window down & not get blown out of the car by the wind! That's because the front of the car is wider than the rear, so the airflow is outside the window opening. I used to cruise at 140kph on the autobahns, it'd do that all day long!

[DaiJekBok]

Such an interesting car with an equally interesting owner. I feel like I would be entertained listening to Kevin read my homeowner's insurance policy to me.

[boulderbarry]

Kevin is the man! He loves sharing his wonderful car. I love seeing him at the local car shows. Thanks to TFL for covering such a great car and great guy!

[johntechwriter]

SOME THINGS ABOUT CITROËN YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW
I grew up amongst a succession of DS sedans and recall my dad having no problems with reliability. The bodies tended to rust out very quickly, however. The manufacturer provided inlets for oil-spraying nozzles around the car, so in winter the most rust-prone areas could be protected, but nobody bothered to use them. (With equal alacrity, they designed a crank starter into the engine. On a freezing Canadian morning, faced with a dead battery, rather than call AAA my father retrieved the jack handle from the trunk and used it to crank start the engine like a Model T Ford.)

The DS’s velvety suspension was supplemented with the entire interior of the car, except the headliner, covered by a two-inch thick layer of foam rubber. Even the floor mats were made from a durable fabric that encapsulated this very thick layer of foam. The seats too were largely filled with foam rubber. All that foam, combined with the soft-riding oleo-pneumatic suspension, gave the occupant the sensation of, as they say, riding on a cloud.

On a curvy road you’d think a car this softly suspended would wallow and induce road-sickness, or at least be cumbersome to manage. But the suspension valving incorporated anti-roll, anti-dive, and anti-squat properties, meaning the car cornered flat and handled exceptionally well. Along with augmenting the car’s ride smoothness, all that foam rubber insulated the occupants from road and wind noise, and in our Canadian winters seemed to make the car cozier. (Canadian DS models came equipped with a high-capacity heating and ventilation system.)

Put all the above together and you have a driving experience that is utterly unique. Riding in a DS, at least for a kid, was like being transported in some futuristic Jules Verne time-bending device that spoiled me for anything in the years to come, including far more expensive cars.

The company ran out of money (not for the first time) during the design phase of the DS series, and could not build the flat-six engine intended for this car. Instead they had to make do with the previous model’s inline four-cylinder. Though it made under 100 hp in its original form, thanks to the car’s light weight and aerodynamic design, it gave 30 miles to the gallon at 70 mph, and was capable of a top speed exceeding 110 mph.

André Citroën, the founder of the company, was ahead of his time in the sense that he could spot a concept or product that was superior but never properly implemented. Rather than merely take note, Citroën capitalized on such novelties as the double-helix gear set, buying the patent then licensing its use and making his first fortune. A graduate of France’s famed Ecole Polytechnique, Citroën was able to adapt Henry Ford’s mass production concept to the production of munitions during WW1, and later to car manufacturing, eventually starting his own company.

Unlike Henry Ford, who brutally suppressed his employees’ attempt to build a union, Citroën was an enlightened magnate. He paid his workers well and provided maternity leave and other benefits that were generations ahead of their time. In the part of Paris where his factory once stood there is a small park named after him.

Under Citroën’s leadership, in the early 1930s the company produced the Traction Avant model, in its way as revolutionary as the DS21 in several ways: His factory in Paris was a model of efficient production that was emulated by all his European competitors. The Traction Avant model’s novel front wheel drive architecture gave it superior handling and comfort, to the point it was the get-away car of choice by French bank robbers. Later, when Paris was occupied by the Nazis, the Gestapo commandeered every Traction Avant they could find due to its superior speed and other qualities.

A bon vivant sans pareil, Citroën lived lavishly even by the standards of an industrialist. He was a gourmand and a womanizer, but what finally brought him down was his addiction to gambling. When the Depression struck in 1929, his company’s profits having been lost at the roulette table, Citroën eventually was forced to transfer ownership to Michelin. (Development cost of the Traction Avant also burdened the company beyond its means.)

A man of good taste to the end — he was to die in 1935 of stomach cancer — Citroën immortalized himself and his brand by funding the lighting of the Eiffel Tower. His combined engineering and aesthetic standards put him in the elite of auto makers — Ferrari, Maserati, Bugatti, Henry Royce, William Lyons who founded Jaguar, and a very few more — in that his product transcended its original purpose, as a transportation device, by providing its occupants with a sense of luxury and futuristic design that to this day impresses even those among us who are not car lovers.

The original post posed the question of whether the DS series was reliable, and the answer is a qualified yes. The car was well built and reliable, but it was not built to last. In their quest for efficient manufacturing and superior fuel economy, the car’s designers incorporated hard plastics throughout the interior. They do not age well and were disappointing even when the car was new. The switchgear also was mediocre. A look under the aluminum hood reveals a gigantic engine bay, crammed full of power plant, the spare tire, and what seem to be miles of high-pressure hydraulic lines. It is this car’s rubber and plastic components, because of their use in every part of the car’s functioning, that make owning this car in modern times contingent on eventually replacing everything that flexes.

After Citroën pulled out of America in the mid-1970s (for them, the 5-mph bumper requirement was the last straw), you could buy a DS for next to nothing. As late as the 1980s and maybe later there was an American source of spare parts. Its founder bought up Citroën parts worldwide and sold them at reasonable prices.

But that was 40 years ago. Now, I suspect, any DS still running has been restored — not by a speculator who seeks to profit from it, but by a genuine enthusiast. They will be discerning about what lucky person is the next owner of their DS.

[Pedro_MVS_Lima]

That pronunciation of the names was actually quite good. This gentleman is very knowledgeable and the car is very well maintained for its age. A really nice video, my congratulations to all the team.

[hubertliegeois]

My Dad had a DS21 in the 70's. This car had the ability to go very fast during long trips on highways. I remember daddy saying "this car has an incredibily roadholding, it's a pure pleasure to drive it"