By the late 1950s Citroën was sensing a gap in its product range between the space-age DS and the rustic 2CV. The solution was a new car based on the engine and mechanical layout of the 2CV with entirely new, more spacious bodywork that was intended, one assumes, to have had some aesthetic link with the revolutionary DS. If this was, in fact, the intention, it failed utterly, for the Ami has been called one of the ugliest cars ever made.
Its visual oddity comes from translating a formal language that belongs to a quite different type of car. The DS had a geometry that was broad, low, crablike and opulent. The Ami was pinched, high, narrow and utilitarian. However, the back-sloping rear window, which added an extra element of grotesquerie, was not simply borrowed from the more perverse US styling elements of the time, but was necessary to provide the cabin length required for a mid-sector car.
However, the Ami did have something, for by 1966 it had become France’s bestselling car, though it never caught on elsewhere. Curiously, it never carried a Citroën badge, perhaps because it was plain that no other company could have made the car, or maybe because the weird jumble of converging planes and trim lines at the front left no room for one. Later, Amis were given the flat four-cylinder engine designed for the follow-on GS model, which gave them almost 90mph performance – insanely fast for this skinny eggshell.
However, in one sense the aesthetic particularities of the Citroën Ami are a delight. It is wonderful to know that there was once a time when national aesthetics were so marked and could vary so wildly from one country to another. The Ami is a poignant reminder of the days when the luxury of national identity in design was still possible.
For all its weirdness, the Ami should be cherished, for it speaks of a time when expressing national identity in automobile design was a permissible indulgence.