DS 'manifesto' reveals a glimpse at its future interiors

Hold the phone, those boutique tarter-uppers of Citroens at DS Automobiles have only gone and released a manifesto, and we think it’s going to slot in nicely into the top 10 between the UN declaration of human rights and that leaflet what Karl Marx wrote.

The manifesto is about car design, and DS is only going to stoke our intrigue further by not saying a word about what its official title of ‘M.i. 21’ even means – and there we were thinking that MI:21 will be the Mission: Impossible film where Tom Cruise finally retires the role of geriatric super spy Ethan Hunt.

In the meantime, DS’s ideas apparently centre around letting more ‘light’ and ‘space’ into its car interiors of the future, profiting from recent technological advances (electric powertrains and that) to finally make the insides of our cars look different to the petrol times.

Crucially, DS also says that its manifesto "incorporates regulatory, industrial and economic demands", which means this isn't pie in the sky nonsense (even if it looks like it) and will actually appear on cars by the end of the decade. That means a new approach to ergonomics, the way we interact with the tech and new materials inside.

The most incendiary proposal DS has come up with is to vanquish its cars of touchscreens, which we are more than delighted to get behind. But wait, that doesn’t seem to mean putting the buttons back – the wacky French carmaker wants to introduce projectors into its cars, so that instead of having screens that are useless when you don’t need them it can have multipurpose spaces. Even better, DS is proposing to have everything controlled by voice commands – what a glorious future awaits us.

Thierry Metroz, head of design at DS, says that the manifesto is much better than a silly concept car that’ll never go into production (we’re paraphrasing slightly) because it will inform all of its work in the future. “We are sharing our creative process and vision with a wide audience of connoisseurs, as much in the automotive world as in the world of craft.”

It’s also presumably cheaper to print off a few copies of M.i. 21 than come up with a whole actual idea for a car to show to people. The new DS manifesto will be on display at the Révélations exhibition, an ‘international biennial for craft and design’ held in Paris, if you happen to be visiting.