{"id":38118,"date":"2025-01-07T11:34:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-07T10:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/?p=38118"},"modified":"2025-01-07T11:34:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-07T10:34:04","slug":"cxperience-2016-when-citroen-design-had-warlike-ambitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/?p=38118","title":{"rendered":"CXperience – 2016: when Citro\u00ebn design had warlike ambitions!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At Stellantis, with the forthcoming demise of the Peugeot 508 and the Citro\u00ebn C5 X, the French top-of-the-range sedan will now be represented by the DS N\u00b08 crossover. Will the new management team to be put in place following the departure of Carlos Tavares call this strategy into question? By 2025, the youngest French brand -DS Automobiles was born in 2014- will be in charge of representing the French premium segment within the Group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Peugeot 604, 605 and 607 and the Citro\u00ebn C6 and C5 X (above<\/strong>) will probably never have a successor. The Peugeot 408 and the Citro\u00ebn C5 Aircross, unveiled in concept form in Paris last October, will therefore have to be regarded as the new flagships of <\/em>the two French brands. And yet, Citro\u00ebn’s top-of-the-range sedan silhouette had already set its sights high in 2016. The presentation of the CXperience concept car proved it. We wanted to remind you what those ambitions were, by opening this archive with this very successful concept car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Designer Gr\u00e9gory Blanchet, then with Citro\u00ebn in 2016 and now with Mercedes, is responsible for the exterior design of this CXperience concept car, which was born almost ten years ago. At the time of the concept car’s presentation, Gr\u00e9gory explained that \u201cour approach is similar to Porsche’s, with soft lines and no edges.<\/em> To caricature, the fewer edges you have on a body, the more difficult it is to work without tension lines that allow you to cheat on proportions and lighting.<\/em> When everything is softened, as it is on our concept car, there’s an enormous amount of work to be done on the quality of volumes and lighting, implied by this aspect of polished pebble.<\/em> Let’s just say that on CXperience, the proportions are right, so it makes the job easier!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe most difficult part of the job,\u201d <\/em>continued Gr\u00e9gory, \u201dis the rear of the car.<\/em> In elevation, you can see the volume of the hatchback, but the car has a real trunk.<\/em> We did a lot of work on the height of this trunk.<\/em> As a result, the rear design is quite similar to that found on certain supercars!<\/em> I can tell you that this is the case, because J\u00e9r\u00e9my Lebonnois, who designed the interior (below), is almost two meters tall and is perfectly comfortable on board!<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The concept car was built in the 3D workshops after two polystyrene volume models had been sculpted and a single one in clay. The concept was presented in 2016, when Marc Pinson, who designed the lines of the C6 Lignage concept car -1999- and the C6 production vehicle -2005-, returned from the PSA Chinese studio to rejoin the DNA team in V\u00e9lizy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Citro\u00ebn’s design center was then headed by Alexandre Malval, who left in 2018 to head Mercedes’ advanced design center in Sophia Antipolis, southern France. Citro\u00ebn announced at the time that this CXperience concept \u201cinspired the brand’s next large sedan<\/em>\u201d, namely the C5 X. True, but this large sedan, designed essentially for the Chinese market and produced in China, did not have the career we had hoped for in Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We’re not here to rewrite history, but rather to lift a corner of the veil on the genesis of this concept car, (above) which went a little unnoticed. The CXp\u00e9rience was indeed an opportunity to break new ground in terms of stylistic identity, with a design modeled like a Porsche! Better still, this Citro\u00ebn even had a fighter plane in it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As with any project, the first studies were based on trend charts to position the product. <\/strong>That of the concept car then codenamed \u201cCP-16\u201d incorporates transcriptions of the world of aviation (above), and more specifically, that of the strange American B2 Spirit bomber designed by Northrop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The French designer was looking for excellence in active aerodynamics and fabulous aeronautical details, because as far as volumes are concerned, while the CXperience is fluid with a style without edge lines (the famous \u201cPorsche-style\u201d design), the B2 Spirit’s style is choppy and fatally dedicated to its stealth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gr\u00e9gory Blanchet explained that “the bodywork can be broken down into two parts.<\/em> There are very curvaceous, smooth and supple areas, and hyper-technical areas such as the headlamps and aerodynamic flaps on the sides and front air intakes.<\/em> On the CXperience, we take full advantage of these areas, which are in black.<\/em> For example, we have three floating directional headlamps inside the front wind tunnel.<\/em> They’re floating because the air flows around them.<\/em> CXperience is a Citro\u00ebn, and Citro\u00ebn is all about aerodynamics.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The shift to 100% electric vehicles, which requires maximum aerodynamic research, should lead Citro\u00ebn to design a concept car dedicated to this theme. Would you be so kind? Citro\u00ebn has always been a hero of aerodynamics, as shown below in the 1950s with the half-drop-shaped C10 project. When will we see a concept car we could call \u201cA-Hero\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back to the warrior CXperience. At 16 meters shorter in length and\u202650 meters less in width (sorry, wingspan), the sedan is easier to park than the plane.We’ve brought these two creations together, with no other intention than to draw a parallel between two objects that break the codes of their own world.For the photo montages of the two machines, we took the documents from a model of the B2 Spirit, as we didn’t have a 1\/1 scale model to hand\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Obviously, the scales of the two \u201cmachines\u201d differ, but this singular face-off highlights the extraordinary progress made in the world of military aviation, since Northrop’s first B2 was delivered for testing in 1989, while Citro\u00ebn had only just unveiled its\u2026XM.Since then, the French automaker has had time to bring its flagship to life alongside its Peugeot 605 cousin, renew it with a C5, and then try to revive the myth with the 2005 C6, inspired by the 1974 CX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A \u201ctall\u201d, bulbous version of the Citro\u00ebn C6 was studied in Citro\u00ebn’s top-of-the-range studio, where Dan Abramson was working at the time.The aim was to counter the Renault VelSatis (2002).A project that never came to fruition\u2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the end of production of the C6 and C5 X, Citro\u00ebn has put an end to the \u201csedans\u201d that top its range. This means that Citro\u00ebn won’t be able to beat the longevity record of the B2 Spirit bomber, which is set to last until 2048!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It’s important, however, to place this concept car in a context that was totally different from the one in which Citro\u00ebn lives today. In 2016, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Duvernier, then in charge of concept cars at Citro\u00ebn (then in charge of exterior design at Lancia before returning to the Stellantis group for a project we’ll be talking about shortly) explained that the CXperience \u201cis a strong message to confirm that Citro\u00ebn will remain present in the large sedan market.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2016, Marc Pinson told us that \u201csegments move so fast today that we can no longer be in a timeless scenario like the 1999 C6 Lignage <\/em>(above, the inspiration for the CXperience).<\/em> That’s something that wouldn’t work anymore.<\/em> Everything’s moving too fast to make the case for wisdom, and that’s true in every field.<\/em> The C6 Lignage sketch was twenty years ago.<\/em>…\u201d Would the 1999 C6 Lignage be more timeless than the CXperience? \u201cThat I don’t know,\u201d<\/em> concludes Marc Pinson. \u201cHistory will tell!<\/em> Since then, history has spoken and put the brand’s sumptuous Citro\u00ebn sedans to bed: Traction, DS, CX, XM, C6… Now it’s time for DS N\u00b08. Don’t crack under pressure!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The idea of a continuum<\/em> between door panels and dashboard has been adopted on the Citro\u00ebn C5 X in 2021, on the left, and also on the DS N\u00b08 on the right, which adds the function of a handle.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To find out more, read our archives on the relationship between the CXperience concept car and the Citro\u00ebn C5 X :<\/strong> https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/?p=22035<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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At Stellantis, with the forthcoming demise of the Peugeot 508 and the Citro\u00ebn C5 X, the French top-of-the-range sedan will now be represented by the DS N\u00b08 crossover. Will the new management team to be put in place following the departure of Carlos Tavares call this strategy into question? By […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38077,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38118"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38160,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38118\/revisions\/38160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lignesauto.fr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}