Pierre Leclercq: “We learn a lot as designers by making sure our cars are affordable”

We learn a lot as designers by making sure our cars are affordable, but as a business still make money. You have choices. 

I have a lot of admiration for the designers at IKEA that do clever entry-level products that are super functional and that everybody needs in their life. I see our mission at Citroën a little bit like theirs. 

When we start a project, we know exactly what price our car should sell for. French identity is difficult to bring out in design. Maybe some foreigners will tell you a car is “very French”. Some people perceive things like that but I’m not so sure. 

Design teams are usually the most international department of any car company. We have Chinese, Indians, Russians and Germans in ours. But ask a young Chinese designer to create a French car and for him or her, it’s going to be complicated. They might not even know what a Citroën 2CV is, for example, so it would be very complicated for them to reinterpret it. 

We try to bring French identity in little details here and there though. Open the glove box of the C5 Aircross, for example, and there are a couple of silhouettes of cars that were built in the same French factory in Brittany, which over the past six years, has pretty much built only Citroën vehicles. And we have a little Eiffel Tower on the C3 as a graphic on the window, along with a silhouette of the Paris skyline. 

In very late 2025 we will launch a concept that is effectively the little sister or brother to our 2022 Oli. The concept’s colour and trim design is even more extreme than on the Oli, but there’s a continuity between them, so it’s a great story to tell. I’m still hoping to make a very colourful production interior in an A- or B-segment car. I think there’s room. 

You have to wait for special editions or things like that, because for a brand like Citroën, with cars that need to have a very low entry price, you have to be careful about such interior colour diversity. That’s the reality for us. The use of mono materials is something Citroën and [parent company] Stellantis is trying to push hard for some parts of the car though, because it’s so much easier to recycle. You just put everything in the same bin. This is something we work on every day now for production cars. 

If you think of a complete interior, it’s complicated to have all the plastic parts – your A pillar, upper IP, lower IP, glove box and more – in colour. Usually, you have to choose either black or maybe dark grey, or something a bit coloured, then keep options open for someone who wants to have something very colourful. 

Our forthcoming concept car was done with a nonautomotive partner. The company is French and big and has the same values as us. Citroën right now is selling in large numbers – more than 500,000 vehicles a year – and making good money per car. 

We are one of the strong pillars of the Stellantis Group. We have this big advantage as each of our cars is ‘multi-energy’ capable. If you have an electric only car, there are things you can do in terms of packaging you could not do with a regular engine, it’s true. But we try to do our best with what we have, and in the end, to do well in the car industry today, you need to have flexibility. I’m an Apple product consumer and use CarPlay. But software is at the heart of our cars more than ever and UX and UI are so important. 

I think we’ve developed some good things on the new C5 Aircross. It’s a big step forward in the carto-customer relationship in comparison to what we had in the previous generations. 

The next few years are going to be complicated. What’s important is to work on the strength of the brand. If you’re a strong brand, it’s easy to sell. We have advantages over companies that don’t have legacy, but that shouldn’t become a weakness. Legacy has to be explored for a reason. Anything we do right now is to create a brand that will be stronger in the future. That’s the only way to survive.