Model: DS Safari
Year: 1968
Location: Qld, 4573
Body Type: Car / Wagon
Transmission: Manual
From the moment their first motorcar rolled out of its Quai de Javel factory in 1919, Citroën has articulated a sense of creativity, style, and innovation that is quite unlike any other automobile manufacturer in history.
One of the company’s most significant achievements came with the introduction of the DS in 1955. This revolutionary, other-worldly automobile shocked the public, the press, and Citroën’s competitors when it was unveiled at the 1955 Paris Salon.
Often imitated but never replicated, the Déesse (a French wordplay for Goddess), pioneered hydro-pneumatic suspension, assistance systems for steering, brakes and gearshifter, inboard disc brakes and headlights that could “see” around corners making the car one of the most engaging yet refined cars ever made to drive.
An overall design that Marcello Gandini famously said was madness from a business and industrial point of view and that was before he had seen the “Safari”
This unmistakably french designed station wagon which even still today presents to a factory standard. Everything from the correct badges down to the correct S.E.V Marchal headlight covers and this doesn’t stop In the interior with the perfect mix of the weird and the wonderful from the single spoke steering wheel and the retractable face to face seats in the boot.
The drive is also sensational, torquey, responsive and never ever boring- especially as it rises from the tarmac on start-up like a concord jet.
Unfortunately fewer than 300 Safari’s are known to survive today and numbers in Australia are even slimmer again.
