Citroën DS: The Car That Ran Its Brakes, Steering, Gearbox and Suspension Off One Hydraulic System

Imagine it's October 1955 and you walk into the Paris Motor Show. Most cars there look like they've been carved from a bread loaf. Then you see the Citroën DS 19: long, low and smooth, looking like it drove in from twenty years later. Say "DS" in French and it sounds like déesse, "goddess." Citroën knew exactly what it was doing.

Visitors agreed. Contemporary accounts say Citroën took around 743 orders in the first 15 minutes and roughly 12,000 by the end of the first day, with about 80,000 deposits over the ten days of the show.

One pump to rule them all

The DS's party trick was that it ran on hydraulics. Engineer Paul Magès developed a high-pressure system, fed by an engine-driven pump, that worked the suspension, power steering, brakes, clutch and gearchange.

The suspension is the famous part. Instead of steel springs, each wheel had a hydropneumatic sphere, with nitrogen gas acting as the spring and hydraulic fluid in between. The result was a fantastically supple ride that also levelled itself whatever the load, plus a lever to raise or lower the car. Start a parked DS and it slowly rises off its haunches like a waking camel. Every time.

Controls from another planet

The DS 19 had no clutch pedal. You changed gear with a small lever by the steering wheel, and the hydraulics handled the clutch for you. The steering wheel had a single spoke. And the brakes weren't worked by a normal pedal: there was a small rubber "button" on the floor that barely moved. Press it like a normal brake pedal and you'd be headbutting the windscreen. Brake force was even split front to rear according to the load in the car.

The front brakes were discs, very advanced for a mass-produced car in 1955, and they sat inboard, next to the gearbox rather than out in the wheels, to cut unsprung weight. Later cars added headlights that swivelled with the steering to look round corners.

Changing a tyre, the Goddess way

That adjustable suspension also made a jack nearly redundant. Raise the car to its highest setting, put a stand under the sill, lower the suspension, and the wheel comes up off the ground. Some people insist a DS can be driven on three wheels. We're not recommending you try.

Was it wonderful or ridiculous?

Both, gloriously. Early cars came with teething troubles, and plenty of garages were baffled by them at first. But once it was sorted, the DS offered a ride and road-holding that conventional cars just couldn't match on the bumpy roads of the time. It stayed in production for about twenty years.

What we love is that Citroën didn't just improve the car. It started again from scratch and asked how every part should work. Some answers were brilliant and some were just strange, and the DS is what you get when you build all of them anyway.

Want to know what one actually costs? The Citroën DS Quirk Database entry logs real auction sold prices, each linked to its result.