Citroën 2CV

Among the 261 Citroën entries in the MotorJury library, the Citroën 2CV holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1948. 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 2CV 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 Toyota Toyota Land Cruiser — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Citroën 2CV reads like this: the record lists its engine as unbulleted list | 375 cc air-cooled H2 | 425 cc air-cooled H2 | 435 cc air-cooled H2 | 602 cc air-cooled H2; kerb weight is recorded at 600 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive layout / Front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Dual-motor, four-wheel-drive layout / Dual-engine, four-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. Production is recorded at 3,867,932 units, which makes it one of the industry's true mass-production stories.

Its place in the Citroën story

Within Citroën's own catalogue the Citroën 2CV sits alongside the Citroën Activa, the Citroën Ami, the Citroën Ami 6, the Citroën Ami 8. It was succeeded by the Citroën Dyane / Citroën AX (indirectly) / Citroën Acadiane (for van models). Design is credited to André Lefèbvre / Flaminio Bertoni / Walter Becchia / Marcel Chinon. Assembly is recorded at France: Levallois-Perret / Argentina: Jeppener, Buenos Aires / Jeppener (1960–1962) / Argentina: Buenos Aires (1962–1980) / Belgium: Forest, Belgium / Forest/Vorst / Belgium: Liège.

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.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Citroën 2CV was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.