WE WERE RUNNING AGAINST THE WIND [509]

The Mercedes-Benz A-Class saloon

For someone that cannot drive, I talk about cars a lot, mostly about how they were designed, like the Citroën CX, or because they provoked a silly culture war, like Ford replacing the Cortina with the Sierra.

Both as an observer and passenger, little is left to do wrongly in building a car, decades of lessons having been learnt. This was what I thought upon seeing a Mercedes-Benz A-Class saloon, which purported to be a “sub-compact” version of their larger cars, while competing on size and price with the Volkswagen Golf, Audi A3 and Vauxhall Astra. All these cars have similar sweeping lines, rounded edges and recessed door handles, numerous attempts at achieving the most aerodynamic shape of vehicle producing an “average” shape.

And yet, the choices Mercedes-Benz made – the low, aggressive front nose, the rounded boot, and shutters that control air flow through the grille – meant they claimed, when it was introduced in 2018, that it had the lowest-drag co-efficiency of any production car. The hatchback version achieved a figure of 0.25, while the saloon achieved 0.22, which is better than a Tesla Model 3 or BMW 3-Series, while matching that of the Porsche Taycan.

If this had been the 1980s, the number “0.22” would have been written somewhere on the car, just as the 1982 Audi 100 had “Cd 0.30” emblazoned on its sides, such was the monumental achievement. That the A-Class has now been axed, without any further fanfare, by Mercedes-Benz, now preferring to focus on larger cars, without any further fanfare, speaks to how easy producing an aerodynamic shape is expected to be.

Drag co-efficiency, measuring the resistance on an object as it is moved through air, water or other “fluid” environment, was once a major selling point for a car. Put extremely simply, a drag co-efficiency score comes from measuring drag – the force opposing an object as it moves through an environment – versus the mass, speed and surface area of the object.

Car companies want to reduce the drag on their cars because it makes their cars faster and more efficient without needing to produce more power, while speaking to build quality through removing any areas where air can be trapped, by both smoothing out body panels and reducing or eliminating the gaps between them. The TV ad for the Audi 100 dramatised this as letting go of parachutes that were holding the car back. 

However, regardless of how the drag-co-efficiency score is produced, the fact that that the lower to zero the score is, the more aerodynamic the object must be, is enough to make use for marketing purposes. For example, the “jelly-mould” styling of the Ford Sierra was a major departure from the boxy styling of the Ford Cortina it replaced, taking some time to grow on British car buyers, but in reducing drag co-efficiency from 0.45 to 0.34, reducing fuel consumption from the engines that were carried over from the Cortina.

Computer-aided design advanced both the drafting and refining of a car’s aerodynamics over the testing of clay models and one-off prototypes. Citroën famously achieved low drag on a number of cars, including the SM coupé, and CX and GS saloons all achieving a figure of under 0.35 during the 1970s, but the British Leyland Princess range, later becoming the maligned Austin Ambassador, only managed around 0.40, typical for a 1970s car designed on paper, but also of poor fit and finish. The Austin Allegro has also been panned as a car more aerodynamic when driven backwards, but I could find no figures to claim either way.

Now that an “average” car shape has been reached – a child drawing a car would now draw an egg with wheels than a three-boxed shape – drag co-efficiency means little. The Ford Puma SUV, the biggest-selling car in the UK, achieves a figure of 0.31-0.32, like its competitor, the Vauxhall Mokka – I guess it is something about being that bit taller off the ground than a regular car. The Audi A3 couldn’t beat the A-Class with 0.28-0.29, but it is at least still in production. Even the latest Cadillac Escalade, essentially a large building moving at speed, has a figure of 0.36. Tesla, BMW and Mercedes-Benz can reach towards 0.2, but only with their saloon cars.

I had to look – the card game “Top Trumps” did not use drag co-efficiency in their car-themed sets, as doing so may require renaming the game.

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY [460]

from a 1967 Renault brochure

While I have previously written about Citroën’s ingeniously designed 2CV, and their spaceship-like CX, the only Citroën my family has owned was a Xsara MPV, or “people carrier” – remember them? – that licensed the name of Pablo Picasso, presumably to mean something.

However, the only car my family has owned more than once – we had two of them – was also French. Made from 1965 to 1980 in a factory near Le Havre, the Renault 16 was one of the first imported cars to sell in big numbers in the UK, a country that rarely bought from outside its own shores before then – we later benefitted from the second-hand market it opened.

As a child, I remember it being big, roomy and comfortable. The ride was also very smooth, which I now know is due to independent rear suspension using torsion bars that spanned the width of the car, requiring the rear right wheel to be placed slightly forward of the left rear wheel. One of the few front-wheel drive cars on sale in 1965, and with its gearbox placed in front of its aluminium engine, there was no transmission, gearstick or handbrake invading the interior space and separating the front seats. Instead, the handbrake was a pull-out lever under the steering wheel, and the gearstick grew out of the steering column. Oddly, the windscreen washers were activated using a button on the floor, near the clutch.

The 16 was Renault’s biggest and most luxurious car when it went on sale, competing with the Ford Cortina and the Austin/Morris 1800, and made various features available in a family car for the first time, like central locking, powered sunroof and driver windows, and air conditioning. Just as taken for granted in new cars today was the split rear bench seats, with many advertisements for the 16 displaying the sheer amount of luggage it could hold.

This leads to the ultimate innovation of the Renault 16. It was not the first car to have a “hatchback”: Citroën had the “Commerciale” variant of its Traction Avant, and various Austin and Morris cars, included the Mini, had “Countryman” versions that had single or split rear hatches. Even the small Renault 4, the 2CV competitor introduced four years before the 16, had what would be described as a hatchback. 

However, all these cars were usually described as estate cars, or station wagons. The Renault 16, with its rear more raked than squared off, and with a tall profile and large windows, fell between a standard saloon and an estate car. “An entirely new breed of car” was what its brochure said, but only Renault’s American division branded it as the “Sedan-Wagon” during its short time on sale there. I guess as a family, we didn’t think anything of it because most new cars were hatchbacks by the time we had our first 16, the avant-garde having become the standard.

According to www.howmanyleft.co.uk, only eighty Renault 16s remain on British roads as of August 2024. How many cars influenced by it remain? Millions.

KEEP IT UP, KEEP IT UP [114]

In the desert, the large metal head of the singer Grace Jones rises from the horizon. Twisting right, its mouth opens, and a car speeds out across the sand, before screeching to a halt. We glimpse the driver, but the car screeches away. We see the driver again: it is Jones herself. “Yeah,” she sings. Once more, a tone higher, “Yeah!!” Higher still: “Yeahhh!!!” Under the car, a caption appears: “Nouvelle CX2.” The car speeds back into the mothership’s mouth, which twists back, hiccups – a hand covers the mouth from the after-effects of eating the car – and the head moves back down. 

When this advertisement appeared in 1986, the Citroën CX had already been on sale for twelve years, and will be for another five, but the refresh completed on the car was designed to reinforce its image as one of the most distinctive and unique cars on the road, alongside the 2CV [link]. It was a company car, a family car, a grand tourer, and the limousine for a number of heads of state, from Jacques Chirac to Nikolai Ceausescu. Grace Jones was seen to be driving it, but Grace Kelly also drove it in real life.

However, it was amazing anyone really got the change to buy one, let alone drive it. In 1974, when the CX was going on sale, Citroën were being rescued from bankruptcy: under the direction of the French government, Peugeot started buying shares in the company, before taking full control in 1976, creating PSA Peugeot Citroën. The cars would continue, but later sharing of parts and design with Peugeot diluted what made Citroën different for many years, until its recent resurgence with the C3, C4 Cactus, and the DS line. The CX is considered to be the final “real Citroën.”

What makes it special? The CX replaced the DS, the goddess-like (“déesse”) space-age saloon, itself on sale for twenty-years. The CX updated the DS’s design with sleeker, lower lines, achieving a low drag co-efficient (usually written as C_x), and influencing later cars like the Rover SD1, Ford Sierra [link] and even the current Audi A5, which is even the same length as the CX. It updated the hydragas suspension from the DS, giving each wheel its own sub-frame to eliminate practically all bumps on the road – the estate model was used to film horse racing, matching speed with a stability of picture that matches what Steadicam would achieve later. This suspension would later be licensed by Rolls-Royce to use on its own cars. Power steering was also standard, but that was because two-thirds of the car’s weight was over the front wheels.

Inside, the dashboard was more reminiscent of a spaceship, presenting the driver with an array of buttons and levels, instead of the usual dials and control stalks. The driver had control of raising and lowering the suspension – there is little that is cooler than seeing a car rise up before it drives away – but they also had to turn the indicator lights off after they made their turn. These two abilities were enough to ban them from being sold in the US, where they were required to be automatic. These regulations have changed since, but at a time where you couldn’t even make the headlights aerodynamic to fit flush with the lines of the car, the CX was restricted to private imports.

Despite all the engineering packed into it, the bankruptcy of Citroën remained the key problem for the CX throughout its time on sale. The CX was meant to have a rotary engine inside, instead of a regular piston engine, but that project was cancelled before it could appear. The company was short of cash, but it bought Maserati, and co-developed the SM coupé, the lessons of which would be included in the CX – Maserati was sold in 1975, after the Italian government stepped in to stop Citroën from liquidating the company.

With Citroën only making either tiny cars, like the 2CV, or massive cars, Peugeot was adept at filling the mid-size market alongside Renault, but with both Peugeot and Citroën having the big car market between them in France, so it could only take sales off itself. With the next Peugeots being the priority, all the advantage the CX had would slip away. The update in 1986 was more cosmetic, and more conventional, but was also expected to happen about five years earlier, sales having already dropped off by then. When a replacement did appear, in 1989’s Citroën XM, it was based on the Peugeot 605. When that car ended production in 2000, it took five years for the CX-like C6 to even appear.

The last CX was made in 1991, and we can now look at it without the problems that blighted its production. Fortunately, many other car makers have too, influencing their designs to this day, and in projecting the image Citroën strives to meet today. Having said that, my father once hired a Citroën C4 Cactus, and for all the touch-screen controls, having rear windows that could wind down would have been nice.