Background
Just as it had done 21 years previously with the revolutionary Traction Avant, Citroën stunned the world at the 1955 Paris Salon with the launch of the outrageously futuristic DS.
The Citroën DS didn’t just raise a few eyebrows.
It genuinely dropped the jaws of everyone who saw it, setting a new paradigm for automotive design in the post-war, space-age era and introducing engineering and aesthetic breakthroughs which influenced decades of designers and engineers to come.
All of which meant that, when the time came to replace the DS, someone was going to have to do something really quite incroyable.
Step forward the ever-dapper Robert Opron, complete with walrus moustache and trademark bow-tie.
His second Citroën interview was with the great Flaminio Bertoni, the firm’s chief designer, and it was somewhat less than auspicious.
In fact, Bertoni threw Opron’s portfolio on the floor and began disdainfully poking it with a stick.
Much to everyone’s surprise, not least his own we imagine, Opron was offered a design job with Citroën two weeks later.
Opron’s landmark design projects included the 1970 GS and the magnificent Maserati-engined SM, but it was ‘Projet L’ - the job of replacing the DS - that drew upon Opron’s full Gallic élan and commitment to technological advancement.
The CX was developed in Citroën’s wind tunnel, ‘CX’ being a French acronym for ‘drag coefficient’, and the resulting car was as smooth and slippery as a lightly oiled otter in an evening suit.
True to their iconoclastic DNA, Citroën tore up the automotive rule book for the CX and created a technological marvel that was simply years ahead of its time.
Despite all the odds against it (not least among them being the car’s initial rotary motor), the CX was ultimately a success precisely because it offered something genuinely new and different in a sea of automotive sameness.
Innovations included the unique hydropneumatic suspension of course (good enough to be adopted under license by Rolls Royce for the Silver Shadow and Bentley T), but also the feather-light DIRAVI powered steering, stalkless controls and delightfully quirky, fish-eye barrel type instrumentation.
Of all the CX iterations that bore those two letters, perhaps the most extraordinary was the Familiale.
Roughly the size of Wiltshire, it was capable of briskly crossing continents with up to 8 people seated in three rows or, with the seats down, a 7ft-long luggage bay.
The Familiale had no real rivals among any of the other major car manufacturers.
It even had six sun visors to keep all three rows of occupants as cool as a vichyssoise.
Even now, nothing says French, wilfully different or avant-garde quite like a Citroën CX.
Just looking at one is enough to make you rush out and buy a black polo-neck and 20 Gauloises.
Autocar said of the CX, ‘There can be little doubt that, as always, you either get on with the Citroën way of life, or you do not; there is no halfway house.’
And LJK Setright, the late, great high-priest of automotive journalism collectively described the CX, GS and SM, as ‘A thinking man’s car’, before opining, ‘Together they demonstrated that there were not many customers who qualified.’
