An Electric Citroën 2CV for Less Than £15,000? I’m Drooling

There are tons of new electric vehicle models coming out every month, but so many of them are similar to each other. It feels like there are just a handful of vehicle types and then a thousand variations of them. But this … this is something special. An electric Citroën 2CV is reportedly in the works. “French firm to modernise famous 2CV brief in bid to revive Europe’s endangered cheap car market,” Autocar summarizes.

We’re talking something that would be a classic car in early Bond movies! And a super cool one at that. We’re talking something that would have been seen in Captain America and the earliest Marvel timeline movies.

And we’re talking an electric version for under £15,000!

“Citroën’s upcoming sub-£15,000 electric car will have ‘exactly the same purpose as the 2CV did in the late 1940s’ in reigniting buyer demand in a stagnant European car market.”

Interesting. Will it? I mean, I find the old-school design super compelling, but how quirky will it be, how much will it appeal to the masses, how competitive will the specs be, how many people will be shopping for new cars in the price range? There are a lot of questions, but I hope Citroën knocks it out of the park and makes it a super appealing but cheap electric car.

We’re supposed to see an early version of the model in October at the Paris Motor Show. And an aim of the model is going to be providing “buying power” to consumers that don’t really have it on the auto market today, or don’t have much choice in that regard.

Europe, in particular, has struggled to recover from the COVID era. Well, its auto market has not come close to recovering. Citroën leadership are drawing a parallel to the time of the original 2CV. CEO Xavier Chardon “compared the European market landscape to that of the late 1940s, when super-affordable and utilitarian ‘people’s cars’ like the 2CV, Fiat 500, Volkswagen Beetle and Austin Mini helped to reinvigorate an automotive industry — and wider economy — that had been decimated by World War II.” Is a new electric Citroën 2CV going to be helpful in getting the European auto market to recover today?

“What is more important than the 2CV is to understand the purpose of the car at that time,” Chardon said. “It was to bring mobility to the masses after World War II, even if it started before. It was to carry four farmers under one roof and be able to carry 50kg of potatoes. I’m not sure that this brief can translate 100% to today — especially because we have less and less farmers in Europe.” However, he said they could swap out farmers for nurses.

All of that said, how to remake the 2CV as an electric vehicle is not clear. They aren’t looking to just do conversions or something too similar to the original. But we don’t really have a clue what a modern electric 2CV will actually look like.

“When you look at people that are visiting Paris, they don’t want to be transported in a Rolls-Royce. Or when they are getting married, they want to get married in a 2CV. When you’re at the shopping mall in the duty-free, you will see 2CVs, because it’s part of France. So this is something that we are analysing.

“But ‘nostalgia for nostalgia’ is not a silver bullet. [There are some] very good examples — like the Mini or Fiat 500, and most likely the Renault 5 will also join the club — but at the same time, we all have in mind a lot of revivals that didn’t follow this path.”