Citroën H Van

The Citroën H Van is one of 261 Citroën models in the MotorJury library, the catalogue that sets out to hold every car ever made — production, prototype and concept alike. The record places its introduction in 1947. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Citroën H Van properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1940s were a decade split in two by war — civilian production stopped almost everywhere, and the cars that followed 1945 carried pre-war engineering into a world desperate for transport. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Porsche Porsche 356, the Chevrolet Chevrolet Bel Air, the Ferrari Ferrari 159 S — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Citroën H Van reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / petrol: / 1628 cc type 72 Straight-four engine / I4 / 1911 cc 11D/type 78 I4 / Diesel engine / diesel: / 1621 cc List of Perkins engines / Perkins 4.; kerb weight is recorded at 1400 kg (base); drive goes through 3-speed manual, single dry plate clutch; the layout is FF layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Citroën story

Within Citroën's own catalogue the Citroën H Van sits alongside the Citroën 2CV, the Citroën Activa, the Citroën Ami, the Citroën Ami 6. The record names the Citroën TUB as its predecessor and the Citroën C35 / Citroën C25 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Flaminio Bertoni, André Lefèbvre. Assembly is recorded at France: Paris / Spain: Vigo (Centro de Vigo).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Citroën H Van costs to live with — that is a different dataset. MotorJury's ownership verdicts are computed from federal complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, published per model year as the nightly ingest reaches each car. If this model was sold in the United States, its years will surface in the ownership database; browse it live or price any car yourself with the true-cost calculator.