The successor to the 'most beautiful car of the 20th century' is smooth, comfortable... and ends up highlighting everything that's wrong in car design today

I saw the Beach Boys play once.

Except I didn’t, not really.

When Surfin’ USA and I Get Around came out I was still many years away from being born. Still, I loved the music once I made it on to this mortal coil: my dad had a tape of their greatest hits, which he played in the car whenever we went on holiday. I think if was called 20 Golden Greats or something like that.

So when the chance to see them live came along in the mid-2000s at an event I was going to, I was excited and intrigued — not least because poor old Brian Wilson (RIP) was already in quite a bad state of health by then. Needless to say, he wasn’t in the line-up on the night I saw his band. The Beach Boys tramped up on stage, with at least seven or eight musicians, most of whom looked younger than me, apart from an old boy at the back who was strumming a bass. Or possibly doing some gentle drumming. I forget the details, but apparently the old boy was a bona fide original line-up member who gave the rest of this tribute act the legal right to call themselves The Beach Boys. Were they still good? Yes. Were the songs still fantastic? Absolutely. But as you can imagine, it just wasn’t really what I’d imagined it would be.

I’d forgotten all about that night 20-odd years ago until a couple of weeks ago, when I drove a Citroën DS.

Except I didn’t, not really. What I drove was a DS Automobiles No. 4.

The original Citroën DS is one of the few cars — along with the original Mini, the VW Beetle, the Model T Ford — that can genuinely be described as iconic. Unveiled in 1955, it was the brainchild of the sculptor and designer Flaminio Bertoni, who worked alongside a French aeronautical engineer called André Lefèbvre to create a design of such audacity that even 70 years later, there really has never been another car like it.

The car’s underlying technology was as futuristic as its flowing lines, with self-levelling hydraulic suspension and disc brakes (it was the first mass-produced car to offer either). It was wildly successful, hopelessly cool and a symbol of post-war recovery from France; the philosopher Roland Barthes called it ‘a purely magical object’ that ‘marks a change in the mythology of cars’, looking like ‘it has fallen from the sky’. And in 2009 it was voted by Classic & Sports Car magazine’s panel of car designers as ‘the most beautiful car in history’.

With the greatest of respect to the designers of DS Automobiles — which was spun off from Citroën not long after I saw The Beach Boys play — it doesn’t seem likely that the DS 4 will still be remembered so fondly in another 70 years. It’s a perfectly pleasant design, smart and fairly sharp. It’s better looking than most cars on the road; but at the same time it still looks very, very similar to most cars on the road.

There’s a lot to like about the car, though. It’s got a perfectly responsive and efficient hybrid engine, with a fully electric version also available. It’s very pleasant to be inside, with comfortable seats, excellent luggage space, and all the toys you’d want. It’s got a reassuring number of physical buttons for things like air conditioning, to go along with the inevitable touchscreen controls. The only black mark against it was that there was a sort of laptop trackpad in the centre console which definitely looked like it should do something, but… well, if it did, then that something is not something that I managed to figure out in a week of fiddling about with everything I could find.

The DS 4 really grew on me over the course of the week. I’d be very happy indeed — delighted, actually — to have one outside the house as my daily driver. But the exotic mystique of the DS brand could — should — offer so much more when it comes to a car’s looks. This is the mid-2000s Beach Boys: the songs are good, the music is in tune, but it’s missing the magic.

What’s more, I feel like they know it. The PR machine of parent company Stellantis speaks of the car’s ‘avant-garde visual identity’, suggesting that they know what they ought to be delivering: a DS should be a car which — as Barthes says — looks as if it might have just dropped out of the sky. Instead, this is a car whose design you forget the moment you look away.

There are myriad reasons — good reasons — why car design is so much duller today than it was in 1955. Safety, economy, comfort and space in modern cars are all worlds apart from where they were 70 years ago, all of which called for compromise on aesthetics. And the electric car revolution has had a huge effect: every chassis today needs space for the batteries (even in the case of a hybrid, such as the one I drove) and that means passengers have to sit up higher to allow for a tonne or two of lithium power below them. Everything ends up looking like a squished-down SUV, and while the DS 4 is far from the worst offender (I’m looking at you, Ford Capri), it’s sad to see an industry once capable of astonishing design feats reduced to this.

Unless someone figures out a way around all the problems, then by the time the year 2109 comes around, and Classic & Sports Car run their ‘most beautiful car of the century’ poll once again, the voters will probably spend most of their time staring into space and trying to remember what any car looked like at all.

DS 4: On The Road

Model tested: DS4 Pallas Hybrid 136 Auto

Price: From £34,630

Power: 136hp

0-62mph: 10.4 seconds

CO2 emissions: 117 g/km

Find out more: dsautomobiles.co.uk