Citroen DS3 Airflow Cabriolet heading for Paris

The Citroen DS3 Cabriolet – expected to be the Citroen DS3 AirFlow – will debut at the Paris Motor Show next month.

The Citroen DS3 is still – three years on from its launch at the Frankfurt Motor Show in 2009 – one of our favourite cars. It looks good, goes well and has a Gallic charm that’s almost unrivalled.

Surprisingly, Citroen hasn’t exploited the appeal of the DS3 in quite the same way as MINI has (or Fiat with the 500) by flooding the market with endless variations on the theme. But one variant that was always a certainty was the DS3 Convertible – and it’s heading for a debut at the Paris Motor Show.

We reported two years ago that Citroen were planning to take the roof off the DS3 (no surprise, even then) but by last year we had more detail including a name – DS3 AirFlow.

The DS3 Cabriolet will arrive as the Citroen DS3 AirFlow and get a landaulette type folding roof although, like the Fiat 500, it will run from the windscreen to the back of the car.

Citroen DS3 Photos  >

The beauty of using a folding cloth sliding roof like this is that the rigidity of the car remains without massive structural additions, the transformation from tin top to soft top is cheaper to implement and, importantly for a car with a very stylish ‘floating’ roof, the profile will change very little.

And now the Citroen DS3 AirFlow is ready to roll and will get its public debut at Paris before going on sale in early 2013 – just in time for spring sunshine. Expect prices around £2k more than the tin top and, eventually, a range of DS3 Airflows that will cover almost all the current DS3 range, from the 100bhp diesel to the 155bhp petrol.