At Skoda, too, everything revolves around electric mobility: Whether the Vision iV, which is still a concept study, or the new Karmiq city SUV - electric machines and battery capacities determine the presence of the Czechs in Geneva.
The Ami One from Citroen is not some study that presents itself at the Geneva Motor Show. With the 2,50 Meter short two-seater, the French brand wants to show how urban mobility will work in the future.
SP-X / Paris. It's pretty cool to take hold of Europe's most famous political slogan: "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité!" The French revolutionaries once called the barricades - freedom, equality, fraternity. Citroen has shamelessly re-wrote and even translated these cornerstones of the western value system into English: In the Parisian photo studio, where the concept car Ami One is waiting for visitors, "Liberty, Electricity, Mobility" is on the wall and the subword City is as bold as Mobility , After all, freedom is still there, but it is now coupled with electricity and mobility. And, one may say, with quite revolutionary ideas.
Two doors, two seats, 2,50 meters long, only 1,50 meters wide and exactly the same height - the Ami One looks like a cube on wheels. The plastic panels of the front and back are designed identically, as well as the two doors, which are logically struck differently. While you operate the passenger door as with any ordinary car, the driver's door opens forward, as in a Rolls-Royce.
Well, it's not that there were two-seater vehicle studies with two and a half meters in length have never existed, one of them even went into series, called Smart. The Smart in the two-seater market has not much competition, so maybe Citroen's idea is just wrong. "No," says Frédéric Duvernier, the chief designer for Citroen's concept cars, "because the Ami One is not a car, but a mobility device."
That sounds a bit off the hook, but becomes more understandable when you look into the very Spartan cockpit. Apart from the rectangular but rounded steering wheel, you will not find much there - and just as the light switch, start button or warning button are designed, you can almost see the designer's reluctance to provide something so profane and conventional in the interior. The most important element is a small box above the steering wheel: There you put your smartphone in, and then not just the infotainment of the phone is integrated into the car. No, a special app manages the entire car, speedometer included - and the navigation map of the cell phone is cheekily mirrored in the windshield, head-up display light.
The smartphone dominates the car, because only then, believe Citroen thought leaders, you can make the current generation even the operation or even the ownership of a car tasty. Added to this are the booming metropolises, whose infrastructures often do not keep pace with the development of the population. "Only 60 percent of Parisians ever own a car," says Duvernier. Absolutely believable, if you look at the daily chaos on the ring highway Périphérique.
And then the designer with the specially French on Ami One out: "You can drive the car with us without a license, from 16, after passing a theoretical exam." This is indeed a smart solution for the Parisian puberty, but in many other European countries this requirement is not met. Although there are also in Germany the so-called microcars (they are mainly from France) and in some eastern states you may even drive them with 15 years. But the microcars, which are also known as quadricycles in France, have not been a resounding sales success in Germany so far, and with prices starting at around 13.000 euros, they are also quite expensive.
That should also apply to the Ami One, because it is of course planned as an electric car. And it's made of expensive carbon, because quadricycles can only weigh 450 kilograms. Nobody at Citroen has taken care of the specific technical implementation, the Ami One has long since ceased to be a development contract, but actually just an idea, so there is only rudimentary data. But Duvernier and his team assert that they have left space for a small battery pack in the underbody, and that the electric motor that drives the rear axle also finds its place in the rear of the car. Because of the empty weight limit of 450 kg (for comparison: the Smart electric drive weighs 1.000 kg.) And because the microcar is only allowed to travel at 45 km / h, there are not too many for the daily range of 100 kilometers (Smart ed: 160 km) Batteries required. On the other hand, 100 kilometers in the huge Parisian metropolitan area is not that much, and the Ami One simply ignores the fact that all manufacturers of small electric cars are currently increasing their ranges. Why? Because ranges at the level of gasoline reserve tanks are not that popular with customers.
But these are, admittedly, concerns of a more classic motorist. Citroen designers speak of the "no-car generation" among the targeted clientele. For these young people quite different standards apply and therefore also a marketing and usage concept for the Ami One was devised. The "friend one", so the translation of the Franco-English combination Ami One, comes basically as a result of an online order to its driver, and one should be able to choose later between five minutes and / or hours, five days, five months and five years of use ,
The five is certainly not carved in the minute-billed carsharing in stone, but basically Citroen imagines, in the future, a part of his car - halt: mobility devices - rather to rent than to sell. The five-year use is also based on a lease, in which monthly amounts include a possible battery replacement and maintenance and even parking fees are included - which can promise so if there is no serial product. Just to remind you: The fact that Tesla buyers can charge their electric cars at the fast charging stations of the motorway service areas for free, applies to new customers since the beginning of 2017 no longer.
All in all, the Citroen Ami One is an interesting contribution to the discussion on how we organize individual mobility in cities in the future. Talking to the Citroen designers, one senses between the lines of their desire to place the modern concept in a mental series with the 2CV, the "duck". Also, this car was radically different in its design in its time and had the task of other car buyers (in this case: the poorer) to make car owners.
If the Ami One succeeds and should therefore be seen en masse in Paris, Berlin, Rome and other European metropolises, then it will definitely achieve two things: It will attract attention and at the same time create more space.
Stefan Anker / SP-X