| I don't know exactly when I became infected with the Citroën
virus. My father always was convinced of Citroëns and other
french cars. He had two GS's in the late seventies. I also
remember two teachers at highschool who had a DS and DS Break
respectively. As a student however, I always wanted to have a
Triumph Spitfire. (I never would have fit in one though !) It was only at the end of my studies that I started to be interested in the Citroën DS. During the last 30 years I owned and drove the following 13 cars (10 Citroëns, 1 Dacia, 2 Renaults): |
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Owned |
Km | ||||
| From | To | start |
end / current |
distance | |
| VISA II Super X | 10-03-1988 | 04-04-1989 scrapeyard | 81.413 | 104.202 | 22.789 |
| DSpecial | 06-04-1989 | 05-12-1994 scrapeyard | 105.756 | 221.647 | 115.891 |
| Dacia Pitesti 1200 | 24-01-1990 | 05-04-1991 sold | 62.927 | 71.382 | 8.455 |
| DS19A Pallas | 02-05-1992 | now | 76.740 | 190.993 | 114.253 |
| ID19P Confort | 06-05-1994 | now | 30 | ||
| GSA Special | 10-11-1994 | 18-07-1996 scrapeyard | 87.728 | ||
| DS20 Break/Ambulance | 10-05-1995 | now | 51.500 | 75.000 | 23.500 |
| XM 2.0i Tecnic | 19-11-1996 | 09-06-2001 sold | 75.495 | 178.000 | 102.505 |
| XM Break Turbo C.T. Tecnic | 09-06-2001 | 29-12-2004 crashed | 76.025 | 176.025 | 100.000 |
| XM Break 2.5 TD | 17-01-2005 | 21-06-2013 scrapeyard | 212.000 | 362.821 | 140.821 |
| Renault Espace 2.0T | 17-03-2011 | 02-03-2016 scrapeyard | 116.949 | 242.429 | 125.480 |
| C3 Pluriel | 05-05-2016 | now | 117.524 | 153.684 | 36.160 |
| Renault Espace 2.0dCi | 22-08-2016 | now | 160.472 | 270.787 | 110.315 |
| Km in DS/ID | 253.644 | ||||
| Km hydropneumatically suspended | 596.970 | ||||
| I bought my first car in 1988 when I started my job here in Karlsruhe. It was a metallic blue 1981 Citroën Visa II Super X. It was a pretty comfortable car, but it had some problems with starting sometimes. I drove about 20.000 km in it before I crashed it after one year. There was no personal harm done in the accident but the car went to the scrapeyard. So I had to start looking for another car, which of course had to be a Citroën. |
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After searching around for a while (by bicycle) I almost bought a CX 2000 GT, but just in time I saw an add for a DS in the local used-stuff-paper. I called made an appointment and made a test drive, and since I liked it a lot I really wanted to buy. In order to do so I had to collect all my courage first, since the car was 16 years old and had already 105.000 km on its odo-meter (very old and an awfull lot of km's I thought). I even had to borrow some money from my father. |
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| In the beginning I really didn't know anything about DS's but
I learned slowly. The car was a "blue lagune" 1973
DSpecial with a nice blue interior, a 5 speed box (not original).
The car was not very good or very nice, but reliable. It only let
me down once in 5 years and over 120.000 km's, and that was
mainly due to bad maintenance from my side.
The first two winters I didn't drove in that car to protect it for the salt. Those winters I drove a very inexpensive Dacia (Romanian licence build Renault 12), the first (but not the last) non-Citroën car I've had until know. In the first year that I had my DSpecial we visited a local meeting of the Dutch DS-Club and the 8th ICCCR in the Netherlands. I sure learned a lot about allthose very similar looking, but nevertheless very different DS modells ! |
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After driving the DSpecial for half of the first winter that I owned it, I bought a very cheap so-called "winter car". This was a Dacia 1200, which is basically a Renault 12 build in Rumania. After driving it for two winters I could even sell it for DM 350, not bad considering that I bought it for DM 550! |
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After three years of enjoying driving my DSpecial I was getting
interested in a real nice and good DS. What I really liked to
have to was a 1968 (model year) DS Pallas with a
semi-automatic gearbox: Model year 1968 because of the new front and the old
dashboard, semi-automatic because "a real DS" is semi-automatic,
that's the way it was introduced in 1955, and Pallas because the
DS is a big luxury car, so it has to be equipped like a luxury
car. |
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| I went to have
a look on a saturday morning. The car was very dark green with a
curry coloured interior. I didn't like the colours that much at
that time but the car was in an excellent shape. The interior was
close to new, no stains or holes in the carpets and clothing of
the seats. Because the car was standing at a Citroën dealer I was able to have a very good look at the under side of the car which also seemed to be in very good condition. The car had only run 78.000 km, the engine was much more silent then what I was accustomed to from my DSpecial, and driving the car with the semi-automatic gearbox seemed like a lot of fun. So after thinking about it for a few weeks I bought the car. I still have it and it really is almost as good as I thought it was.I only drive it when there is no salt on the streets of course, but then I also use it as my daily car. It never let me down until now. The semi-automatic gearbox is really great. |
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| In the region where we live a weekly "advertisements only" newspaper called "Sperrmüll" is published. It's mainly used for selling second hand stuff, and of course it also has a car section. I hardly ever buy this newspaper but I did buy a copy in the end of April 1994. In that issue there was an add with the following text : Citroen ID19, 1957, good condition, price DM 4300,-. At that time I was neither looking for another D-modell nor specially interested in very old D's, but this sounded too good to be true. So after not much thinking I grabbed the phone and called the seller: Yes, it was really a 1957 ID19 and was also in good condition, he said. So I went to see the car the next day. |  |
| When I arrived it was still standing in the garage,
we had to push it out because the engine wouldn't run. The car looked
really good, only one minor dent in the right rear wing, no significant
rust on any body panel, no rust holes in the sills, no welding done on the
chassis at all, a good original interior (no stains, no holes) etc.
The owner, a young guy of my age, told me that he bought the car a few years earlier from a garagist near Chambery in France. The garagist had driven the car himself for years, after he bought it back from the customer he sold it to. The owner had used the car when he lived in France for a few years, he had also driven the car to Germany to visit his parents (that is were the car was standing). He was now in the process of starting a business and didn't had time for the car anymore. After fiddling around with the fuel line we got the engine running, sort of. At this stage I said to myself, "You're nuts if you don't buy this car". I told the owner that I would think about it, and call him back in a few days. After consulting a friend I basically decided to buy it. At a second visit we also drove a few hundred meters in the car. This revealed that the engine was running on three cylinders or so, that the front brakes didn't work and that the front suspension didn't work (locked in upper position). But since the car was so good in all other points I decided to buy it. After I had a arranged a garage to store the car, the owner brought me the car on a trailer. In the following weeks I first got the engine running properly (I only put in new ignition cables) and then cleaned both the height correctors, that fixed the supension problem. I then had a short drive in the car, with only the rear brakes working. During that drive the engine overheated so I ordered a new radiator. Shortly after I put in the new radiator I finally cleared the DS19 from my own garage so I drove the ID19 home (still without front brakes). This was the only drive I had in the ID until now. Some time later I crashed the oilpan of the engine while moving the car out of the garage, one of the stupidest things I ever did in my live ! As consequence I had to take the engine out of the car. Since I "don't like half work" I took everything out of the engine bay (including the front suspension etc.) in order to clean/restore everything. Unfortuneatly I never found the time to rebuild everything so the car is still without engine until today. But someday I'll have it running again, in the mean time its standing in a dry garage. |
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| This car served us well for 3,5 years and 100.000 km until I crashed in december 2004. |  |
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| This is the replacement for our poor
1992 XM Break TCT.
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