The Citroen C-Aircross is a city SUV concept

So, here it is – Citroen’s newest attempt to make a city-based SUV interesting. 

It’s called the C-Aircross Concept, and has the usual gamut of concept car gadgets – suicide doors, quilted seats, panoramic glass roof and an almost complete absence of buttons. There’s also a single-spoke wheel (in grand Citroen tradition) and individual sound zones so that passengers can listen to their own music. It sounds outlandish, but it actually works on the same basis as noise-cancelling headphones, creating a kind of sphere of sound. There’s also media streaming and sharing, and cameras and touchscreens abound.

Underneath, there’s raised suspension and front-wheel drive, so it’s not about to tackle the Moors any time soon (unlike all those Evoques on the King’s Road, which definitely have).

So, the C-Aircross is really a compendium of concept car tech on what’s essentially a French hatchback with SUV pretensions. 

That said, and we’re misappropriating (and misquoting) Oscar Wilde here, but cynicism is the virtue of the vicious. Instead, let’s celebrate the fact that Citroen seems to have its groove back, and is displaying what appears to be a genuine desire to build funky, off-kilter cars, as opposed to the anonymous boxes of recent memory (the old C3, for instance). 

And why not inject a little fun and frivolity into the SUV segment? With the rate that we’re trading in our saloons, estates and traditional 4x4s for city-based SUVs and crossovers, it’s relieving to think that our future doesn’t involve the phrases ‘photocopier’ and ‘set to 70 per cent’. 

We were waiting for luxury offshoot DS to put some spark in the otherwise fairly tepid segment, given the history of the DS name, but it seems that Citroen’s beaten them to the punch.

So, Citroen, for the sake of all the future fathers and mothers out there, please go entirely nuts, if only to offer us an amusing counterpoint to a charcoal-grey Audi Q-something.