It was a dark and stormy night.
It was just a few minutes past six in the morning, and I was driving my parents to church. It’s a trip I make every week, and I have a good idea what to expect on the roads at that time on a Sunday. I know where the less well lit stretches are, and where the revelers from the night before wait by the roadside to hail the cabs home. I also know that to stay within the ‘green wave’ of traffic lights along the route, one has to maintain a steady average within the speed limit.
This time, though, the roads were slick with rain – which was still coming down in sheets. Occasional flashes of lightning arc-ed the sky. And – to my great surprise – mum was silent. She wasn’t prompting me to slow down, to keep to the left, to watch out for this bike or that bus.
A year ago, i wrote on how the Citroën DS5 is a rolling Rorschach test; indeed as recently as within the past twelve hours, my friends have described the car variously as “a tank” and “sporty”. To the extent that both descriptions are valid, the DS5 is an authentic translation of the C-SportLounge concept from 2005. As might be deduced from its name, C-SportLounge sought to redefine the traditional coupé through a distinctively Citroën-esque lens.
No car will ever tear up the rule book the way the original DS was able to, back in 1955. Sociologically and politically, the world was a different place then. The DS was the enfant terrible of its time, and it was totally unapologetic in its role as cultural provocateur. In the same way, almost everything about the DS5 forces you to take a stand, and – just as one would when wrestling with the best of Sartre or Barthes – you’re very likely to find that stand riven by internal tension and contradiction.
How else would one attempt to reconcile those eighteen-inch wheels with the anaesthesia of the electric power-steering, or the apparently claustrophobic toit cockpit with the reality of top-hat max headroom? How else would one attempt to find congruence in the aluminium inserts – lifted straight from the golden age of jet flight in the 1950s – and the disco inferno tachometer? And let’s not even get started on the art deco interior, nor the three separate speedometers. In these architectural conundrums alone, the DS5 stands shoulder to shoulder with that other maddeningly intriguing large Citroën, the CX.
But is she (or, should that be ‘he’) a DS? In a post-modernist world, it seems entirely appropriate that even the gender of the DS5 should be ambiguous – more than one friend has remarked on how “masculine” the car is. The original DS was more than an engineering and architectural masterpiece – it was a cultural wonder. It embodied fluidity, and it cossetted even when standing still (partially because it was never technically standing still).
And thus we come back to that dark and stormy night.
Mum wasn’t the least bit perturbed by the storm because it wasn’t even registering on her radar. She was in an automobile – a Citroën DS5 – which was doing a supreme job of isolating her from the elements, while speeding her onwards to her destination, in the most elegant manner architecturally possible. She was – in all senses of the word – in a DS.
