Citroen DS3 Review & Road Test
We spend a week with the first of Citroen’s DS Range – the Citroen DS3 DSport 1.6i 16V THP 150 – for a review & Road Test. Is it just a tarted-up C3, or a true MINI competitor?
Citroen has a long and noble history of ploughing its own furrow. They may sometimes have struggled with the build quality and reliability of some Citroens – although certainly not all – but you could never really have called them boring.
From the 2CV to the SM, Citroens offered a bold statement of intent and conspired to offer individual style, something no other major car maker could compete with in quite the same way. But although that quirkiness and individuality may have helped sales in France – and to anyone with a similar view of the world to Salvador Dali – it turned off more potential buyers than it turned on.
Which goes a long way to explaining why Citroen became the builder of slightly bland and boring hatches. Not that building slightly bland hatches is necessarily a bar to sales success – it’s something a big chunk of the car-buying public seem to want – but it was a bit of a disappointment to those who found the quirkiness of Citroen to be its heart and soul. Without the individuality, what was left?
What was left was a range of perfectly competent cars which seemed to be striving to be as Germanic as possible; at least in terms of build quality and ergonomics. At least Citroens still managed to offer a more feather-pillow ride than the competition, but it still felt a cop-out; the soul had gone and what was left was car design by numbers. It felt like Citroen had decided to look at what the public was buying and made their version of that. A bit like modern politics.
Although Citroen had chosen its new path there were obviously still those deep in the bowels of Citroen who pined for the past, or at least for the individuality the past represented. And the powers that be at Citroen allowed some of that individuality to blossom under the banner of ‘Concepts’ which showed – and continue to show – that Citroen is as capable of being as barking mad as it ever was.
But with the corporate blandness winning out on production models we were less than welcoming when we first discovered that Citroen had decided to revive the ‘Goddess’ – the iconic DS range. ‘Badge Engineering’, we declared to all who would listen. A selling-out of the heritage of the past for the sake of a few badge-engineered sales, we declared.
Not for the first time we were wrong. Despite the Citroen DS3 – the first of the new DS range – sharing the majority of its DNA with the competent – but rather unexciting – Citroen C3, the Citroen DS3 looked terrific – completely different to its C3 sibling. But it was entering a market place where it would have to be very good indeed to achieve any sort of success. It was taking on BMW’s revived – and enormously successful – MINI. And even though it looked absolutely cracking, it was never going to be able to take the underpinnings of the C3 and turn them in to the same sort of hugely appealing – and hugely fun – drive the MINI offers.
Oh, really?
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