
Citroën
The Citroën Zabrus is a concept car with 3 doors and a 2+2 shooting brake design that was designed by the Italian design studio Bertone. It was based on the mechanics of the Citroën BX 4TC. It was first presented in May 1986 at the Turin Motor Show. The hatchback of the Citroën BX itself was based on a design by Bertone.
Notable features of the car include an all-LCD monitor display for the odometer, gauges, and more, as well as a “belt-type” steering wheel that rotated in either direction while mounted on the main display. The Zabrus is a shooting brake with a 2+2 seating configuration, with two scissor doors upfront for easy access to the rear seats. The Zabrus was powered by the 2141 cc turbocharged I4 engine from the BX 4TC, producing 147 kW (197 hp; 200 PS) at 5250 rpm and 294 N⋅m (217 lb⋅ft) of torque at 2750 rpm. Like the 4TC, the Zabrus is all wheel drive and power is sent to the wheels through a five speed manual transmission. This setup gave it a top speed of 138 mph (222 km/h).
From the Wikipedia article Citroën Zabrus, CC BY-SA.
The Citroën Zabrus 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 1986. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Citroën Zabrus properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. 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 Jeep Jeep Wrangler, the Ferrari Ferrari F40, the Renault Renault Espace — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Citroën Zabrus reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2141 cc (turbocharged I4); quoted output is 147 kW (197 hp; 200 PS); drive goes through 5 speed manual; the layout is Front engine, all wheel drive. 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.
Within Citroën's own catalogue the Citroën Zabrus sits alongside the Citroën 2CV, the Citroën Activa, the Citroën Ami, the Citroën Ami 6. Design is credited to Marc Deschamps at Bertone.
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.
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.
What this page cannot yet tell you is what the Citroën Zabrus 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.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.