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The more I think about it, Citroën during the postwar years is like the French Chrysler with their focus on clever engineering. It's a shame that Citroën could never set up a proper dealership network. (Ditto for the equally underrated Panhard.)
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Agreed that they never had the dealer network they needed (in North America, at least), but two main factors killed them off: legislation mandating fixed-height headlamps and Peugeot.
The former was an NHTSA ruling that helped to give cars in the North American market some of the world's worst headlights for nearly 50 years. The latter was that after Peugeot's acquisition of Citroën in 1974, the company (PSA) had no interest in adapting the models to meet US regulations, current or upcoming, and had ambitions for the US market that did not include having an in-house rival.
Definitely ditto Panhard, BTW. But they sold so few cars on this side of the world that they were pretty much insignificant, which is a shame as some of them were brilliant. Would happily take a BT/CT24 any day of the week.
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I know of two 24CTs in Los Angeles and have seen others sporadically come up on eBay, in Hemmings, etc. but they're a bit scarce.
Really great engineering behind them, though. I've always appreciated how (until recently) the French manufacturers generally had rather different approaches to how to engineer a car that may not have made sense from the outside, but once you drove and lived with it began to make perfect sense.
Really hoping that this Stellantis thing FCA and PSA are doing isn't a complete fiasco. PSA's cars have become somewhat boring over the past couple of decades, with nothing much to distinguish them from other European manufacturers.
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