How a company as stubborn, as in different to popular tastes, as arbitrary and as nonconformist as France's automaking Citroen could survive in the 20th century is perhaps the single most amazing aspect of the extraordinary firm. In a style-conscious country, Citroen produces some of the ugliest duck lings in the auto world -and sometimes leaves them unchanged for 20 years or more. It practically never advertises in France, maintains supersecrecy about itself, and arrogantly sniffs at its com petitors' concern for style and their methods of hurried obsolescence. Yet the appetite for Citroen cars is so in satiable that the company last week stretched out the waiting time for delivery of some of its models from two to three months. Says one Citroen executive: "Other carmakers have customers, but we have fanatics." Menacing Dogs. The fanatics have made Citroen France's second biggest automaker (after nationalized Renault), with expected sales this year of some 450,000 vehicles worth more than $600 million. They have been attracted by what makes Citroen what it is: a devotion to research and engineering that has endowed its peculiar-looking cars with countless ingenious features. Its research department is the absolute mas ter in deciding what a car will be like, gets whatever it wants in staff or appropriations. Pursuing what it calls "functional esthetics," Citroen slowly builds the innards for readability, ride and dependability, then designs the body around them. "A mask concealing what is inside cannot create true beauty," says a Citroen designer, "because true beauty is reality."
Many of the company's designers are aeronautical engineers who constantly test designs in wind tunnels and work in a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere. Two high walls block out Citroen's proving grounds in Normandy, and the no man's land between them is patrolled by menacing dogs and guards. The only nonresearch employee who may enter without a special pass signed by three persons is a conservative economist, Pierre Bercot, 59, who is Citroen's president.
Disposable Parts. Research was also the passion of the company's founder, Andre Citroen, a high-living production and promotion wizard who revamped France's sluggish artillery-shell plants in World War I, later introduced Henry Ford's mass-production techniques to begin his auto firm. He advertised with songs and skywriting, once had the Eiffel Tower strung with 250,000 lights that spelled CITROEN. But he spent even more lavishly on development and the Deauville gaming tables, lost control of the company to the more staid and highly secretive Tiremaker Michelin in 1934, and died heartbroken within a year.