And it’s the perfect partner to your Ami One.
This is how Citroen reckons we’ll be doing intercity travel in the future. It’s called the 19_19 Concept which references the year the company was established – exactly a century ago was the first time a car rolled away with the dual-chevrons on its nose and now, the company is showing off exactly how it’ll continue to do that in the years to come.
With a design inspired by aviation, the 19_19 features an exposed powertrain and LIDAR sensors on the roof that are (allegedly) designed to look like the horizontal stabilisers on an aircraft. There are light-bars front and rear of course what also display the Citroen double-chevron motif, while there are digital rear view mires and rear-hinged doors, providing unimpeded access to the entire vehicle.
The 19_19 is not an SUV or a crossover, but you may have noticed it’s sitting high. The car features an evolved version of the marque’s Progressive Hydraulic Cushion suspension that is so advanced, they’ve emphasised its capability by including travel lines along the bodywork so that observers can see just how much the car absorbs as it progresses.
The 19_19 rides on colossal 30-inch alloys which are wrapped in tyres specially-designed by Goodyear. They feature natural sponge to improve traction and refinement, while also featuring sensors that can communicate road conditions back to the autonomous driving system.
Between the wheels sits a ‘living room on wheels,” where each passenger has a wildly different seating experience depending on which part of the ‘room’ they’re in. While the driver has a sculpted, supportive seat like you’d find on a semi-performance car, the front passenger enjoys a chaise-lounge type affair that allows you to luxuriate as the car does its thing. Separating them is a composite centre console that looks quite a lot like marble, which extends rearwards, where it meets a sofa-style seat that’s made up of bungee-mesh fabric that not only keeps people comfy, but provides easy access into the cargo area (who needs folding seats, eh).
The dashboard is a minimal, two-tier affair with driving data shown on the windscreen itself, and there’s an AI assistant in the middle of the dash that appears when you trigger autonomous driving mode. The infotainment nonsense then gets beamed onto the small window that sits beneath the dashboard, while additional parameters can be displayed on the touch-sensitive display in the middle of the steering wheel.
In perhaps less interesting news, the 19_19 Concept actually has a fully-detailed powertrain, which consists of two motors (one on either axle) producing a combined 335kW and 800Nm. That’s able to propel the living room from rest to 100km/h in just 5-seconds, and onwards to a top speed of 200km/h. Juice comes from a 100kWh battery that, according to the WLTP testing procedure, is good enough to give the 19_19 an all-electric range of over 800km. Rapid charging is also available, with the 19_19 able to juice up as much as 611km of range in just 20-minutes.
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