Blog

Apr 03, 2024

Aaron Robinson: Across Europe on a Hot Date with a Citroën ID19

Going out with a Goddess brings a lot of pressure. The oddest thing about registering a car in Germany is that they stamp your license plates right there in the Kraftfahrzeug-Zulassungsstelle, which

Going out with a Goddess brings a lot of pressure.

The oddest thing about registering a car in Germany is that they stamp your license plates right there in the Kraftfahrzeug-Zulassungsstelle, which is the Deutschland DMV.

After you’ve paid the tax and collected your green-tinted Kraftfahrzeugschein and Kraftfahrzeugbrief (title and registration), a clerk picks a pair of blanks off a shelf containing all of Germany’s various shapes and colors of plates. He or she arranges blocks of numbers and letters in a small hydraulic press, steps on a foot pedal to activate the machine, and then feeds the stamped plates through an automated hot-roller that prints black ink on the raised letters. You give the clerk 30 euros and you get back a pair of plates that are as warm as a couple of freshly baked baguettes.

To obtain the plates, I had to become an official resident of Bavaria, which made three or four generations of Robinsons/Rubinoviches do somersaults in their graves. C/D’s European correspondent, Juergen Zoellter, kindly arranged it, making me the first American residing in his little village of Fischach since—well, since anyone can remember.

All this bureaucracy and ancestor-annoying was on behalf of a 1964 Citroën ID19 that I had just purchased near Stuttgart with the intention of shipping it home after an epic Continental drive. The ID was the slightly cheaper sister model to the DS, the “Déesse,” the Goddess, a car that stands with the beret, the accordion, and Édith Piaf as one of the pillars of  French cultural cliches.

It all started badly when, upon concluding the deal for this pristine automobile with its loving and detail-obsessed now former owner, I immediately backed it straight into his driveway gate. Metal was bent; hearts were broken. So far, it’s the worst thing ever to happen to me behind the wheel, and I once crashed a Ferrari on a press launch. Into a monument to Enzo Ferrari.

A lot of bad karma must have been repaid in that moment in the driveway, however, because there I was, traveling in a 48-year-old French vehicle with power steering, the industry’s first production power disc brakes (front only), a hydropneumatic self-leveling suspension that rests the car’s bulk on four balloons of compressed nitrogen, and a web of hydraulic lines that are pressurized to 1900 psi, and nothing exploded.

As if floating on a river of Isigny crème fraîche, the Goddess glided across Germany and France and into Luxembourg, then on to the Belgian Ardennes to trace the doomed route of Joachim Peiper’s 1st SS Panzers during the Battle of the Bulge. To be seen and photographed were German Tigers on plinths, small museums with hand-drawn maps of the local skirmishes, and buildings with bullet holes still in them.

Then it was down to Calais and the Eurotunnel train to England for the War & Peace Show. After that, I left the Citroën, filthy, despoiled with mud, and littered with empty water bottles and brochures for tank driving schools, parked at Gatwick Airport for three days while I frolicked in Italy with the 720-hp Pagani Huayra. Upon my return, the 70-hp Citroën started with half a crank.

Then it was back to Belgium for the handoff to the shippers. Over 1200 miles, the long-stroke, 1.9-liter four-cylinder burned less than half a quart of 10W-40. The tall ratios of the four-on-the-tree transmission delivered both 70 mph and an average of 32 mpg.

The Déesse was in development for 15 years, right through the Nazi occupation. Almost nothing about the car is carlike in any normal way, from the monospoke steering wheel to the bizarrely elliptical suspension arms to the way all four fenders and the fiberglass roof detach with a few bolts, yet leave the vehicle perfectly drivable. On three wheels, if necessary. People watching it spin on its turntable at the 1955 Paris auto show must have thought that the world would never be the same, that mankind had kicked down some door in its evolution and taken a flying leap into the future.

Soon enough the Edsel arrived to drag us back, but never mind. Citroën took 12,000 orders at the Salon that Thursday in October, and the DS was in production for two decades with about 1.5 million built. Given PSA Peugeot Citroën’s current shabby state, I’m sure it wishes it had something like the original DS now.

Almost since the automobile was in-vented, power, speed, and social rank have been expressed with the same design language: long hoods, large grilles and wheels, and low rooflines. Many consider the Goddess the car of  the century because it looked stunning and functioned brilliantly while giving two-fingers-up to convention. What rewards await the firm that finally summons the courage to produce a successor?

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