it has been more than a week since i drove a Citroën DS5 for the first time.
uncharacteristically for me, i have not felt compelled to write about the experience; and i have been spending the past eight days wondering why.
one reason might be that even before the car made its debut in Shanghai last year, i had made my mind up that i would one day own one as my personal means of transport. while that day has not yet come, the knowledge of this has tempered my impetus to write about the car. exactly why this should be the case, i cannot claim to have definitively deconstructed.
never has any car i have owned been such a flawed prospect. cars are inherently compromises, but when putting pen to paper in a contractual agreement, one generally chooses the model with the fewest flaws.
alas, 'generalizations' is not a concept which is easily translated to the vocabulary of the DS5.
with the benefit of a week of introspection, i am leaning towards the suspicion that my writer's block is because i have been entertaining the sacrilegious possibility that the DS5 is not a true Citroën.
what is the essence of the marque?
i have many early memories from my childhood of encounters with (other people's) Citroëns, such as watching a DS plough serenely through a flood, and hitching a lift home one day after school in my classmate's dad's GS.
just as vivid, is the memory of the first time i crawled inside a CX. from the ashtray to the radio, from the instrumentation to the door handles, and of course the strange levers and knobs sprouting from the most obscure angles, the CX was a car like no other.
to my young mind at least, that first encounter with a CX - even though its engine and hydraulic systems were not even activated - seared an indelible impression of what Citroëns were about, an impression possibly matched only by the original DS.
so what of the DS5?
when i call the DS5 to mind, i confront myself with fears and questions. i find myself challenging my own assumptions about the state of how things are, and how they should be.
when i think of the DS5, i do not think of an automobile; instead i see a mirror into myself, into the values i cherish, into the experiences which moulded me as a child, into my own hopes and dreams for the future.
do you really want to know how it drives?
of course you say you do, but tell me again your answer, after a week has passed.
because while the DS5 may not be the answer to life, the universe, and everything, it runs the number 42 pretty darn close.
generalizations be damned.
