The Citroën DS drew 12,000 orders on its first day in 1955
Citroën spent 18 years secretly developing a successor to the Traction Avant. When the DS 19 appeared at the Paris Motor Show on 6 October 1955, buyers placed 743 orders within 15 minutes, and its 80,000 deposits over ten days stood as a record for over 60 years, until Tesla's Model 3 in 2016.
The name was a pun: said aloud in French, DS sounds like déesse, goddess, while its cheaper sibling, the ID, sounds like idée, idea. Italian sculptor Flaminio Bertoni shaped the body and aeronautical engineer André Lefèbvre handled the engineering. Roland Barthes wrote that it seemed to have dropped from the sky, and a 2005 poll of 20 leading car designers for Classic & Sports Car later voted it the most beautiful car ever made.
Underneath, hydraulics did far more than usual. A pump pressurised a closed system to 17.2 MPa, powering not only brakes and steering but also the clutch, gear changes and a self-levelling suspension devised in-house by Paul Magès. Drivers could raise or lower the ride height, and the car glided over France's rough roads with a comfort often likened to a magic carpet. It was the first mass-produced car to succeed with disc brakes, a fibreglass roof lowered its centre of gravity, and in 1967 the Series 3 brought headlights that turned with the steering.
Owner Michelin, which controlled Citroën from 1934 to 1974 and treated it almost as a laboratory, ensured it rode on radial tyres. Rallying suited a car built for speed on poor surfaces: it won the Monte Carlo Rally in 1959 and again in 1966, and in 1974 it beat more than 70 rivals in a London-Sahara-Munich event that only five others finished.
The sensation had a cost. Fearing it could not match the DS, Citroën launched no clean-sheet model between 1955 and 1970. By the end of production in 1975, 1,455,746 had been built in six countries, 1,330,755 of them at the Quai de Javel works in Paris.
Source: Citroën DS
