Philosophers of the Auto

How a company as stubborn, as in different to popular tastes, as arbitrary and as nonconformist as France's automaking Citroen could survive in the 20th century is perhaps the single most amazing aspect of the extraordinary firm. In a style-conscious country, Citroen produces some of the ugliest duck lings in the auto world -and sometimes leaves them unchanged for 20 years or more. It practically never advertises in France, maintains supersecrecy about itself, and arrogantly sniffs at its com petitors' concern for style and their methods of hurried obsolescence. Yet the appetite for Citroen cars is so in satiable that the company last week stretched out the waiting time for delivery of some of its models from two to three months. Says one Citroen executive: "Other carmakers have customers, but we have fanatics." Menacing Dogs. The fanatics have made Citroen France's second biggest automaker (after nationalized Renault), with expected sales this year of some 450,000 vehicles worth more than $600 million. They have been attracted by what makes Citroen what it is: a devotion to research and engineering that has endowed its peculiar-looking cars with countless ingenious features. Its research department is the absolute mas ter in deciding what a car will be like, gets whatever it wants in staff or appropriations. Pursuing what it calls "functional esthetics," Citroen slowly builds the innards for readability, ride and dependability, then designs the body around them. "A mask concealing what is inside cannot create true beauty," says a Citroen designer, "because true beauty is reality."

Many of the company's designers are aeronautical engineers who constantly test designs in wind tunnels and work in a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere. Two high walls block out Citroen's proving grounds in Normandy, and the no man's land between them is patrolled by menacing dogs and guards. The only nonresearch employee who may enter without a special pass signed by three persons is a conservative economist, Pierre Bercot, 59, who is Citroen's president.

Disposable Parts. Research was also the passion of the company's founder, Andre Citroen, a high-living production and promotion wizard who revamped France's sluggish artillery-shell plants in World War I, later introduced Henry Ford's mass-production techniques to begin his auto firm. He advertised with songs and skywriting, once had the Eiffel Tower strung with 250,000 lights that spelled CITROEN. But he spent even more lavishly on development and the Deauville gaming tables, lost control of the company to the more staid and highly secretive Tiremaker Michelin in 1934, and died heartbroken within a year.

The company kept right on riding on Andre Citroen's road of radical research and development. When Citroen's tinny, square-nosed Deux Chevaux model made its debut 15 years ago, many people refused to ride in the "four wheels covered by an umbrella," and wags said that a can opener was needed to get in and out. But 1,500,000 Frenchmen have bought it-and are still buying it (current price: $1,055). For one thing, they like its "disposable" qualities: when a motorist scrunches up a fender, he can simply toss it away, screw on another one for a total cost of $20. Slightly more luxurious but no handsomer than the Deux Chevaux is Citroen's $1,350 AMI-6, whose slablike roof rests atop a grinning front end, and whose rearend-thanks to a remarkable suspension system-levels automatically after a front wheel encounters a bump.

Royal Disdain. Citroen's star is the shovel-nosed, short-tailed D519 ($2,727 in France), whose odd shape is aerodynamically designed to cut wind resistance. The favorite car of French Cabinet ministers and the preferred getaway car of French bank robbers, it easily guns up to 100 m.p.h., but hugs the road with its front-wheel drive and can stop on a franc with its two separate sets of brakes. The company is now experimenting for many years ahead, working on turbine engines and a radar ride control that will scan the road ahead and adjust the suspension system to any coming bumps.

Quiet, intense President Bercot is against exporting too many of his cars (too many expenses, too many compromises), does not think much of Detroit's proliferation of models. "We think offering a wide variety of models is too easy a solution," he said last week. "It is intellectually easy, and builders who take this way out are taking the easy way. Our concern is to offer the best possible car for the widest range of clients." Citroen is so confident of its philosophical approach to building autos that it even refers to one of its popular cars as "Descartes in nuts and bolts."

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