DS is working on an all-new reimagining of the… original DS

Yep, you read that right: the car that inspired the very existence of the standalone luxury spin-off brand is being primed for a renaissance.

TG.com caught up with DS design boss Thierry Métroz ahead of the Chantilly concours d’elegance, primarily to check out the lovely SM Tribute concept car, and he confirmed that the early Seventies space-age coupe wasn’t the only thing firing up his team. CEO Olivier François is apparently all over a post-modern heritage raid.

“Olivier is pushing us to create a greater link with our history, in terms of story-telling and design,” Métroz explains. “Our dream is to be the Louis Vuitton of the automotive industry. It might take years to happen, it might never happen, but there will be more design inspiration in the next generation of cars. Our history is what separates us from the new wave of Chinese cars. They have no emotional connection.”

The original DS - one of the few cars for which the comically overused ‘iconic’ is genuinely appropriate - stunned show-goers when it first appeared at the 1955 Paris motor show. Yep, you’re right: the 70th anniversary is almost upon us, and something interesting might be happening at the increasingly important Retromobile in Paris next February.

“The brief [on the SM Tribute] was not to do a retro design,” Métroz continues. “With this one I said to my team, ‘try to imagine if the SM didn’t stop in 1975, imagine that it continued across four, five or six cycles.’ It’s a different exercise. What I would like is to have the link with the original DS but feasible on a different silhouette, and feasible on a different size of car, and for that to work on a complete line-up.

“I’m talking about a super low, elegant, long silhouette. We’ve been working on this for many months and we have a solution, a new design strategy feasible for a complete range of cars.”

This includes a resurrection of the fabled DS, which sold around 1.5m units across a 20-year time-span between 1955 and 1975, and is widely thought to be the greatest example of car design in automotive history. “So yes, we are working on the same kind of concept with the DS as on the SM Tribute,” Métroz adds. “It was a project to discuss with Olivier and Carlos [Tavares] about the future of our design strategy. Now it’s validated and the strategy is clear. Now we have to execute it. We are currently in discussions with engineering.”

François is very keen, not least because DS is still struggling to establish itself as a credible luxury force after 10 years as a separate brand.

During the first six months of the year it registered 20,706 cars in Europe, a decline of 20.8 per cent compared to the same period in 2023. “Something inspired by the 1955 DS, that’s what everyone is waiting for,” he noted recently. “I think that this is exactly the right direction in which we will have to go and we are working on it. We are showing you through the SM what we will do through the DS.”

Métroz, meanwhile, is adamant that this is the way forward. DS isn’t making an impact following the herd, so why not tap into the back catalogue and really go for it? “No more SUVs. There’s no shortage of them in the group,” he states firmly. “Maybe we can do something different, more free and elegant. We are talking about the art of travel, after all. An SUV is not the best expression for French luxury. Differentiation is our obsession, although we obviously need to share components.

“The DS SM Tribute is based on a current Stellantis platform,” he adds. “It’s a credible car. It’s close to a real car, we don’t want to put a distance between this concept and the customer. You could drive this car tomorrow. The two-tone bonnet treatment is ready for production, and you will see it on the next DS model.”

That won’t be a DS, erm, DS. But it seems we won’t have to wait long for it.