Doug DeMuro’s shtick of pointing out odd features and quirks felt like it was always leading to this moment. As anyone who knows Citroens will tell you, quirks define cars like the CX.
From the single-spoke steering wheel to the hydropneumatic suspension to pretty much everything in between, Citroen’s designers seemed to be allergic to doing things the traditional way.
It’s all great fodder for DeMuro as he covers the work the French manufacturer’s designers made for themselves by being quirky. Things like the single-spoke steering wheel seem cool and useful on their own but led to a bunch of work rethinking simple things.
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With just one spoke in the steering wheel, it’s easy to see the instrument binnacle and you can put your hands almost anywhere on the wheel without impediment. That does, however, mean that you can’t really have stalks. Citroen had to find a new place to put the indicator button and the windshield wiper control, and even the horn, since the design wasn’t really amenable to putting any of it in the usual place.
Citroen’s solution was to put all of those controls on little extra bits that jut out from the instrument panel, kind of like where Volkswagen is putting the drive selector in its ID. vehicles. That’s good and well, but it just means that pretty much everything you interact with as a driver is not where you’re used to.
And that’s to say nothing of the self-centering steering wheel, which makes the car go straight much faster than you’re used to. It makes for an odd, but not necessarily bad, experience.
“Frankly, I think it’s pretty fun to drive,” says DeMuro. “It’s certainly a quirky experience between the steering wheel and the self-centering steering and the comfortable suspension and obviously just the look of the car is so strange.”