Citroen 2cv pages
citrobe.org
citrobe.org
For urban driving he typically drove in 2nd or 3rd gear at around 23 mph which was very slow in a straight line and terrifying around corners and roundabouts. I used to see ashen faced drivers out of the passenger window trying to understand why his engine was screaming and the car was lurching at such an extreme angle around the roundabout lanes. He would typically have a car full of stuff which would be rolling around on the floor and it wasn't unusual be hit on the head with an easel or painting under extreme braking evasions. Great cars, spent a lot of time in 2CVs in France too, such character...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheval_fiscal (current formula, french page)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_horsepower#France (general explanation)
Yup. With its 602cc engine, it absolutely wiped the floor with the 911. Totally unfair fight, fully 30 seconds faster per mile.
I probably shouldn't have goaded him into the bits that still had speed bumps, eh?
He ended up convincing me to refrain from purchasing the D50 I had my eye on—it was selling for less than three grand at the time, not in mint condition, but with a weathered patina that suited its faded buttery canary yellow just right. The Northeast, he said, given its often extreme weather conditions in winter, uses too much salt to weather driving conditions. I had to be prepared to replacing its chassis in just a couple of years thenceforth, were I to expose it to Boston’s driving conditions.
I wanted that little car to be my every-day commuter here in Boston, it would not have proven feasible to garage it over the winter, so I had to let it go.
In retrospect, having driven in Boston all these years after the fact, not ending up that little car proved a prudentchoice. Cudos to the gentleman Citroen farmer for his sage advice.
https://elektrofrosch-berlin.de
I think its a good successor of the spirit of the 2cv
For a bit of context, design started in 1935, a third of the french population was still working in farms, although it was declining. I wonder if they thought it could not go much lower than that. (cf. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_des_trois_secteurs#/media/...)
A 75%-efficient 1000-watt 20000-rpm quadcopter motor is one horsepower, costs about US$150, is about 50 mm in each dimension, and weighs 250 g. If you couple it to an 8-mm-diameter output shaft, the shaft's surface speed is 8.4 m/s or 30 km/hour. Hook up a 10 cfm cooling fan to remove the 250 watts of heat (the other 25%), mount the shaft between sprung two ball bearings that press it up against a rollerblade wheel, and you have a one-horsepower roller skate.
An average human can wear two such skates at a time, thus providing deux chevaux of power, 1500 W, which is 180 N (the weight of 18 kg) at 30 km/hour or 1100 N at 5 km/hour, plenty of power to burn rubber. Accelerating a 100-kg human to 30 km/hour requires 3.5 kJ, 2.3 seconds at two horsepower, limited in practice by traction. Most of the time you would be using much less power than that, and of course you need active traction control so you don't burn rubber every time you pick up your foot and put it back down, but this seems like a tractable engineering problem.
If your average net power usage (losses to air resistance, road roughness, rolling resistance, and round-trip losses from regenerative braking) is 100 watts, a two-hour trip is 0.7 megajoules. This is considerably lower than the average power usage of a Citroen 2CV because a human has a lot less air resistance than a car, even with a helmet and kneepads.
You could provide this energy with 1.9 kg of lithium-ion batteries in a backpack, costing about US$300, but plausibly you could make it cheaper by using high-discharge-rate lithium cells for half or a quarter of that (US$75 or US$150) and US$40 of deep-cycle lead-acid batteries (4 kg) for the rest.
The "2CV" in the car name was kind of a tax fraud, though. An actual Citroen 2CV offered 9 horsepower even at the beginning and 29 horsepower by the end, which is a lot more than you can strap onto your feet even with modern drone motors.
On the other hand, if you used a larger shaft, you could get the skates to go a lot faster than a 2CV could. But I'm not sure that would be a good idea.
It was not, the taxable horsepower and the “actual” horsepower are completely different things, as the former is derived from displacement (and / or gear speed at a fixed rpm). There was no fraud because this was how it was expected to work.
At the time nobody cared about the real horsepower anyway. Until the late 80's the only benchmark that people view in term of car performance capability was the top speed and at a lesser level the 0 to 100kph numbers. The first speed limits had been introduced only in 1974 and at first been presented as temporary measures.
By the way the French state use the proper metric unit for power, watts, and not horsepower.
In Italy it is called "cavalli fiscali" same exact meaning of the French translation.
The value depends on the the engine displacement and it's not a unit of measure for power.
The power is indicated in KW, not Hp and has been for a long time now.
So no fraud, same displacement, same tax.
Which also makes sense, it ties the tax to how much volume of fuel can be potentially burnt into the combustion chambers.
EDIT:
Italy being Italy, of course the formula to calculate the value is in a national law approved by the parliament (Art. 9 ter)
http://www.edizionieuropee.it/law/html/89/zn95_24_013.html#_...
They’re simply two completely different units, historically barely related (although since 1998 the french taxable horsepower does depend at all on the actual horsepower which previously was not the case, and since 2020 it is only a factor of the actual horsepower).
Fiscal horsepower is a tool of taxation, incentivisation, and segmentation.
I was convinced to throw away my relatively small and likely valueless but prized collection to well-intentioned "decluttering" when I moved to my own house. The thing is, they actually did spark joy, as Marie Kondo would say.
Also data books. Sure, electronic formats are objectively better in nearly every sense from weight, dead tree count and Ctrl-F-ability, but nothing says you know what you're about better than a well-thumbed Philips data book.
Surely someone must have collected scans of these data sheets somewhere? I'd love to look through some of them again. There is some on bitsavers, but I'd like to see some more.
https://citroenvie.com/those-who-have-made-the-brave-attempt...
Yes, lots of parallels with the Mehari there. And with the Moke, similar concept but using Mini parts.
As a side note what was really interesting was the (very rare) 2CV "Sahara" (it was 4 wheel drive with two engines):
https://buy.motorious.com/articles/features/316288/this-citr...
The very worst was the SM, which overcomplicated just about everything. If you open the hood on one you'll have at least six "WHY?"'s going through your head at once, the kicker being the rotating shaft over the top of the engine to drive a pump on the other side of the block.
As for the suspension, it's the only car that you can scrape the mirrors with while it's still on all four wheels ;)
short for "deux chevaux", i.e. ... 2CV.
They should make a lovely, pastel, electric version of this. I bet it would be a hit!
To people already preparing to explain how ridiculous that idea is, I know :)
It's more of a pipe dream. Just physically makes no sense to carry around 60kg of an ultra lightweight car (estimate taken from lightest Shell eco-marathon prototypes) instead of the 40kg of the heaviest ebikes. Not sure if there's any feasibility wiggle room.
For French Francs multiply by three or so, German Marks divide by 1.10.
I was in a crash in a 2CV, it was my first car and after that never got into another one. The damage was incredible given the kind of accident it was.
I am not sure whether the 2CV was ever sold in the USA, but it has definitely been imported. I think in the US, the limit is 25 years before you can import a foreign car. I've encountered plenty of 2CVs and Méharis in North America.
I lived in the USA in 70s and 80s. I never saw more than 1 or 2 Citroen cars in all of that time. And those two cars were stared at by everyone like aliens.
The issue is that it could not be sold: it was particularly low-powered even for french cars of the time, the original model barely reached 40 mph (out of a 9 hp engine), and the later fastest models topped out around 70.
The 2CV had literally been designed to cross freshly ploughed fields and drive on unpaved roads, it just was not suitable for the interstate-expanding American market.
She still have it but drives a ‘74 beetle daily.
I remember (when briefly living in LA) that we drove it from LA to Las Vegas in july (also in the mid 80’ies). It was HOT!
People always got shocked when the hood was piped open and showing of an engine that have the size of a lawn mower (relative to the typical V8)…
Fortunately, my first car was (and is) a Citroën DS 23. I have not tried Citroën's new suspension (seems to be limited so far to the kind of car, I don't particularly care for), partly because I've grown disgruntled with Citroën since about the time PSA (or whatever they are called now) started the DS brand, but I really ought to.
The Dyane is much better as a car but it was also a bit more expensive and people really loved the 2CV for its lines and thought the Dyane to be too blockish.
My second car was a DS (a DS 21 to be precise), I loved it and ended up touring the former east bloc with it (and ended up living in Poland because of it).
I've done plenty of really long trips with it (many thousands of km), but I did replace all of the accessible high pressure LHM tubing at some point to get rid of the periodical 'Arret!' light on the dash because the system lost pressure. I can also tell you from experience that trying to drive a DS without pressure is both an art and a body building exercise at once.
Xantia is a great compromise between 'modern' and 'old fashioned', a bit plasticy but the one I had I drove into the ground over many 100's of thousands of km. The final nail in that particular coffin was to lose the headgasket somewhere between Munich and NL and just continuing the trip, it even got decent fuel economy but it wouldn't start up after being shut down and once we looked into the engine it was declared a miracle that it made it all the way back. Great car, all around and given the distances covered ultra reliable.
The real problem in the DS model is the semi-automatic gearbox which is super finicky regarding hydraulics levels (you'll notice a ticking sound when it is trying to engage and can't quite make it due to a lack of fluid, you can temporarily fix that under the hood by forcibly actuating it but driving it like that is really not recommended. Nor is driving it when one of your drive shafts breaks and you block up that side of the drive train. Nice low engine revs though, we jokingly called it 'economy mode'.
I also had an ID-19, a simpler but altogether far more robust car.
Agreed that the ID (idée)-19 had a lot of advantages from its simplicity.
Have a look behind the left hand front wheel cover panel and say that again :) There has to be at least 50 meters worth of high pressure line behind there and a functional analog computer using hydraulics. That's what keeps the car balanced front/back and left/right. The height adjusters just do the static balancing for load, that thing on the left front does it dynamically with a response time in the 10's of milliseconds and keeps continuous track of what 'level' means to the car occupants. It is a very impressive piece of engineering which has some components that will leave you completely puzzled (a tube with a few hundred metal plates in it with a tiny hole through the middle, for instance) if you don't know what they are for.
My Xantia is the Activa V6 model. That ES9 engine is a beast. I've been told that it's usually the car, not the engine, that breaks first with those ones. But really, what I was more interested in was the Activa suspension. It feels like driving a go-kart, yet with the suspension of a Bentley, and the practicality of a hatchback. I know they were trying the same sort of anti-body roll for the DS back in the 1960s, but money was always running out (unfortunately, I cannot seem to find the pictures, I know they exist online somewhere).
I intend to keep my Xantia around for a long time. Took it to the US once, and drove from coast to coast and back again.
DS with a five speed manual is the best combo, keep an eye on your steering housing (those tend to go slowly but failure is potentially catastrophic) and front carrier arms, the bushings will wear out and then you'll start to eat tires. Other than that, your main enemy is chassis rust, everything else can be fixed.
I've recently bought a house with room for a workshop. I've known for a while that the steering on the DS was an issue that needed fixing. Now that I will finally have room to work on it, I look forward to start fixing this among other issues. Including fixing the wiring for the thermostat to the dashboard.
Rebuilt units can be bought, they're better than the originals and should last the (remaining) lifetime of the car, I would definitely recommend against trying to rebuild one yourself, they are super finicky to work on and require a ton of specialist tooling (and experience) to do the work properly.
Note that there are right and left hand drive versions of these. Also there typically is a charge if you don't give them your old one for rebuild in return after you've completed the transplant, and, of course there is a huge difference between the 'red' and the 'green' version, which has to do with the sealing materials used, the 'red' system uses a hydraulic oil which is extremely corrosive.
One example (green, LHD):
https://citrotech.nl/shop/product/stuurhuis-ds-lhm-linksgest...
Obviously, after replacing the steering housing you'll need to have the car aligned again, and while you are at it you may as well replace CV boots and ball joints since it is mostly just the price of the materials at that point.
You'd think France as the Western Europe would focus more on safety and emissions (apparently French are very climate conscious).
Do you really think they were "nations"?