Opinion: why the Citroen Ami is a guilty pleasure

On the surface you wouldn’t think the humble Citroen Ami would be the cause of any guilt at all. Just 2.5 metres long, 1.4 metres wide and powered by a tiny 5.5kWh battery, it’s slight of footprint and thrifty of rare metals; just the sort of thing an eco warrior might use to go and throw soup at a painting. Ethically faultless.

Nope, the guilt comes from elsewhere. A paltry 8bhp is all that seeps out of the electric motor, and when you punch 458kg of Ami into the mysterious Calculator of Car Physics it comes back with a top speed of… 28mph. Drive one of these and the only speed cameras you need to worry about are in villages in Wales. Ardderchog!

For owners of the Ami, its glacial pace is plainly not a problem. In fact, it’s part of the appeal. It’s a car (sorry, quadricycle) designed to compete with riding a bike to the train station in heavy sleet in February, and at £99 a month there are literally some young people who will run the numbers and think they’re better off in one of these than in lycra.

Which is fine if you live in a great urban expanse where breaching double figures on the speedo is the kind of achievement that makes headlines in the local paper. But how many of us could really, truly justify owning a car (sod it, I’m not apologising twice) that would never - not once - need to up the ante?

This matters. Because much like towing a caravan on a busy A road on a bank holiday weekend, there is no greater shame that can be experienced by the human mind than holding up innocent people who would dearly love to be plodding along at more than half the posted speed limit.

I got a taste of this in the summer while testing the Ami both in basic (okay, okay - every Ami is basic) and workhorse, Cargo form without the passenger seat. Life in its natural habitat is easy: it trundles through town with a jolly spring in its step as random strangers shout ‘Nice car mate!’ from the pavement. The novelty factor is strong.

But stray into a 40mph zone and the grinning pedestrians vanish, replaced with a rapidly growing queue of increasingly irate drivers all wondering which berk motorised a Cozy Coupe and stuck it on the public highway. Suddenly you’re faced with a serious moral dilemma: how long is it reasonable to subject fellow citizens to a painfully slow crawl, tossing away precious seconds that could be spent in the company of loved ones, or curing disease?

Turns out it’s around eight seconds. Roughly the time needed for your brain to go from ‘Oops, this wasn’t a good idea’ to ‘Oh sugar now someone’s beeping at me’ to ‘WHY DOES THIS ROAD HAVE NO EXITS?’ Mercifully the mirrors are rubbish, so you’ll never see the 48-car train of fury behind you.

Anyway, I got around this problem by going out late at night, at an hour when most folk have turned in and television channels are filling their schedules with non-stop poker. Yep, the Ami has to wait until after dark to drop its ASBO tag, like a weird, reverse curfew.

Freed of nuisance status, the Ami is a hoot. Not because it’s good to drive - it isn’t - but you get an overwhelming sense of doing something you’re not supposed to, with no real consequences. Like streaking at a football match, but only after everyone’s gone home. Ethically faultless.

If the Ami’s not guilty pleasure, I don’t know what is.