Citroën is preparing a comeback for the iconic 2CV

Nearly 80 years after its 1948 debut and more than 35 years after production ended, the 2CV is preparing to make a comeback.

At the Paris Motor Show (October 12-18), Citroën is showing an electric reboot of the 2CV, regarded as France's answer to boomer classics like the Fiat 500 and the VW Beetle.

For now, the car is only a concept, but the French carmaker wants to put the small car into production within two years and build on a history of more than 5 million vehicles.

Just as with the original, Citroën says it is again targeting the mass market. The modern-day 2CV is tailored to the new M1E vehicle category, still to be approved by the EU, which is intended to promote sales of small electric cars from Europe.

That's why the production car is later expected to cost only around €15,000, Citroën said at the unveiling. However, that may mean savings on the drivetrain and equipment.

When the original 2CV debuted at the Paris Motor Show in 1948, it was positioned as a "car for the little people", and its mass-market pricing logic proved transformative. Constrained early production still produced waiting lists of up to six years, underscoring how a genuinely affordable car could unlock huge pent-up demand - an approach Citroën now invokes again when it talks about aiming at the mass market with a revived 2CV

While Citroën is not yet saying anything about the drivetrain and is only hinting at a range of around 200 to 300 kilometres, the French carmaker has plenty to say about the design.

At 3.67 metres, the concept is even slightly shorter than the original, but alongside the basic shape and the idea of an affordable mass-market model, it also adopts many details from the original and reinterprets them: this starts with the large folding roof, continues with the revolver-style gear selector on the dashboard and culminates in the door pockets, which are specially padded for transporting eggs.

Getting a basket of eggs to market undamaged, even on poor roads, was one of the most important requirements set for the developers of the original - a bar that the comeback model also looks set to clear.