2010 Top Gear Awards: Small Car of the Year

The boardroom of Citroen must be a very happy place right now, lots of hand-clasping and pointy-fingered greetings, maybe a couple of subtle high-fives when nobody's looking. For the first time in years, the product planners, engineers and designers have a proper solid-gold hit, a car that embodies everything that Citroen always promised, but so rarely managed to deliver. Citroen has the DS3, and things are looking up.  

Words: Tom Ford
Photography: Lee Brimble

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This article was originally published in the Awards issue of Top Gear magazine

Yes, yes, we've all been relentlessly battered with the corporate spiel that back in the day Citroen led the way in technological innovation coupled with sophisticated, seductive styling inspired by absinthe, sex and chocolate croissants - but most of the people who remember those iconic cars are unfortunately now quite dead. To anyone under 35, Citroen has been the flag-bearer for cheap lease-deals, bargain-bucket prices and chav desperation. The company turned on a commercial lathe that shaved a little of its credibility with each passing year. It's not been pretty, frankly, watching Citroen become rubbish.

Of course, rays of hope did weakly twinkle for Citroen's return to modernity, but cars like the C6 occupy such painfully rarefied niches that it's impossible to peg any kind of commercial success on something that sold only to French government officials with domestic leasing arrangements. The C4, however, was better. The C5 a car that you would seriously consider against the German competition. But now Citroen has stepped up its game. The world has seen the DS3. And the world is pleased.

This is the first Citroen in a long time that you buy because you want it, rather than because it was the only car you could afford. A car that has tempted buyers from price brackets above as well as below, a hatchback that beats the Mini, and trumps the Fiat 500 - a statement unbelievable a couple of years ago.

The marketing is part of the strategy, obviously. Happily marching down a path trod firm by the Mini and 500, the DS3 offers downsizers somewhere to discreetly put their cash, a place to get some of the big-car feel distilled in a small-car package. It sits at the apex of luxury and practicality (both in the physical and financial senses), and is underpinned by the most important ingredient - it's fashionable.

Indeed, the DS3 manages a neat trick of vehicular androgeny, a stylish but essentially blank-faced canvas, until a buyer decides how their car will look. The basic DS3 is neither a ‘boy's car' nor a ‘girl's car' - it chameleons very much depending on the spec choice - something, incidentally, a Mini always managed quite well and something the Fiat 500 always had to cope with by intimating irony.

The hardware might come from relatively humble beginnings (the C3 begets the basic engineering of the DS3), but it's packaged in such a way that it loses its generic nature, convoluted into something more interesting. Engines are perky and fizzy - even the diesels feel sparky in a DS3 - and sacrifices are made in pursuit of spiritual and mental happiness. Pure practical vision is sacrificed for interesting windowlines; absolute practicality is blunted, just to give us something interesting to look at.

It's all part of the game plan, to engage emotions. People endlessly compare new fashion hardware to Apple products. But when you consider what that represents: clear, stylish functional design that's both reassuringly expensive and jauntily fashionable, you have Citroen's tipping point displayed before you. And in the same way that people will pay exorbitant prices for apps and add-ons to the basic structure, they'll do the same for a car.

People will pay to be the same but different. You offer the acceptable face of hip urban tribalism, then you immediately offer them a carpaccio of individualism so thinly sliced and premium-priced that they think they thought of it themselves. The market thanks you for overcharging for a roof sticker. The DS3 is that car. Contrasting roofs, wheels, option packs, graphics, interior treatments; very few DS3s will leave the production line the same. And that makes people excited, because it allows them to be an individual who's also one of the crowd.

On the inside, interior plastics are not ludicrously soft-touch throughout, nor is the design religiously ergonomic or painfully thoroughly equipped. But the car works hard, thoughtfully and intuitively. It spends its effort so wisely in your company that you appreciate how Citroen really has gone through with a masterplan for the DS3, rather than ending up with a car built by a committee of conflicting agendas. Most cars feel like they've been edited down from something else. The DS3 does not.

But the real reason TopGear loves the DS3 so much is that it isn't just a fashion accessory. Behind all the slick Mini-esque marketing bluster and all the lipstick and glitter, there's a very good, confidently dynamic little car. The DS3 might look a bit ‘fashion', but when a keen driver starts to play, you realise several very important things. First, the steering is keen, fluid and precise, making for a little car that places on the road easily and goes exactly where you point it - a boon for both keen drivers and urban parkers. The power assistance is spry and communicative, carrying information without any tedious blathering about the state of the road.

The ride is similarly grown-up, neither confined to a lazy lollop nor shattering crack-down. In fact, when you really start to explore, the DS3 pushes back with a little thrum of Gallic flair. Enthuse at speed, and you can tuck the nose, lift, and cause the rear end to - if not exactly slew sideways - at least give a playful jiggle. This is fun. It might not have the expensively engineered Z-axle brilliance of the Mini (the DS3 has torsion-bar rear suspension, which is cheaper and far more compact than the BMW solution), but its limits are accessed far more freely than the Mini's, making the DS3 seem like a car that always feels like it's on your side. It is, for its completeness and rounded set of abilities rather than any specific one, a bloody triumph.

So this is a car that looks set to change the fortunes of the whole company. No longer is Citroen floundering on the spikes of perceived cheapness, desperately discounting new stock. Suddenly, people are accepting that a Citroen pitches premium. The DS3 is the car that has done for the company - in one fell swoop - what it took Skoda 20 years to do: lift itself from the Happy Shopper Basket of Doom.

If that turns out to be the case, then this small hatchback will be the car that saves Citroen. A car that demonstrates via sales figures that small and useful don't need to be predictable, that cheap needn't be dowdy. It's brilliant, this little DS3. You could draw an obscure allegory to our Awards location: Citroen, like China, has been a slumbering commercial giant just waiting for the little ember that sparks the whole lot into vibrant, powerful life. For China, it's been the opening up of world trade. For Citroen, it could be something as simple as having a car as easy to fall for as the DS3. No mean feat for a flouncy little hatchback, now, is it?