This Old Weird French Car Is Cooler Than Today’s Supercars - The Citroen SM 

Great video about an automotive icon.. A few extra characteristics of the SM and other hydropneumatic Citroens include.. * Under braking the front & rear squat - no nosedive or instability * There was a load proportioning valve between front & rear brakes, according to vehicle load and strength of squeezing or stomping on the brake mushroom * You could drive on 3 wheels with one rear wheel removed * If you suffered a blow out on a front wheels - no loss of control in steering and brakes. Charles de Gaul was ambushed by snippers and his chauffeur was able to speed away with 2 wheels shot out. * If you have a rear wheel blow out you may hear it before you feel it. * The self leveling suspension had 3 driving heights, plus full height for wheel changing & flooded streams and lowest for servicing, wheel changing and looking cool. * Being able to raise and lower the suspension assisted passengers getting in and out. Particularly the elderly... we before SUVs. * Fantastic tow cars because of the short distance between the rear wheels and tow ball, plus self levelling. Winding the jockey wheel was unnecessary with changing the level of the car or wagon. * The DS & SM & Traction were all technically mid engined with the motor behind the gearbox... I suggest anyone who blanket criticizes Citroens has never driven one unless it had never been properly serviced.... The last real Citroens were the C6 and C4 Cactus. 2CVs are an icon in themselves - at the opposite end to the SM... Vive la Difference.... Manifique...

That opening scene in The Longest Yard is so bittersweet to re-watch because in my first watching I went from euphoria to shock and devastation.

As a kid (and I do mean kid, like 12-, 13-, 14-year old), I worked at my dad's garage every summer. He had a customer who owned THREE of these Citroens ... and these were the ONLY cars I was not allowed to work on. I also never drove one, not even into the garage nor onto the rack.

In 1978 I had a year in London at age 24 over from Australia. Had the privilege of custodianship of new 2CV6 Club, CX 2400 EFI 5 speed Prestige - plus RR Silver Shadow II... The Prestige has the SM type DIRAVI self centring power steering with 2.5 turns v 2.0. It has the same wheel base as the DS & SM and longer than the Shadow, which also had Citroen suspension under license... All passengers including my parents preferred the Prestige to the Roller for ride and seat comfort... Being a late 70s British car the Shadow suffered lots of foibles - including a "Failure to Proceed" near Stonehenge aged 3 weeks old... and loss of power steering fluid twice, loss of all lights mid corner with the local police chief in Sweden in the front passenger's seat. Even got the Shadow back from service with the rear suspension dragging its bum because of a stuck height corrector... did I mention a small cluster of bubbles in the woodwork in the dashboard or metal filings on the boot carpet where they had drilled for the rear number plate..?! Talk about SM foibles when launched... what about the fabulous Triumph Stag???

Patrick McGoohan drove a version of this one in a Columbo episode from 1975 ("Identity Crisis"). He played an uber-stylish, over-the-top CIA operative combining James Bond with many nods to "The Prisoner," including that dark blue jacket with the white piping, and saying "Be seeing you" a few times.

Great video thanks

Citroën owned Maserati in the late sixties.

That’s my car (and video) showing off the rain-sensing wipers! 😂

Some trivia/fun facts about te Citroën SM (SM stands for "Sa Majesté" = her majesty): As far as I know it was the most powerful front-wheel driven car of it's era (not just one of the), This flag was taken over by another quirky/funky/luxurious performance car of the 80's and early 90's: the Lancia Thema 8.32 (with an 8 cylinder Ferrari engine with 32 valves - taken from the 308 QV), which I have owned. There's another movie in which you can see the SM (though briefly); Zoolander (2001), in which Ben Stiller as the main character "Zoolander" is kidnapped in an SM(!), very funny and action packed movie. One of the best football players of all time: Johan Cruyff owned one. Those were my trivia and also: there was one standing often at the other end of the street where I live, unfortunately I never met the owner (in the Netherlands, btw you still sometimes see them here). Oh and one more thing, there are Citroën SM enthusiasts clubs, but if you search for "SM club" you might land on quite different sites.

It looks like this video was made without anyone approaching the SM, just using existing footage.. but I watched it anyways!

i colect cars , cheap or ofered this and the Stratos are the both ones that i really wanted and got away , i almost forget the Ferrari daytona too, as far as citroen goes the tracion avant as it was called was already a confortable car, the DS 19 to the 22 were very interesting cars ,Rolls Royce when the brand still existed asked citroen permission to use it´s hidraulic system when the release of the siver shadow , Mercedes at the time built it´s own hidraulic system who was in fact efective but almost no one today knows how it worked, avoid buying one if it as any problem or soon to have it, the repair would cost a lot more than the car and with this i refered the best cars around in the early 70´s, the SM wasn´t a regular citroen as it had better finishings at a high level of luxury and power like no other from this excelent brand with it Maserati engine, a lot called it citroen maserati . The Xantia till mid 90´s was using the same system only after 95 they started to have solved the one problem refered by many, the steering felt too loose at high speeds but i never notice any problem if not so talked about when they changed the steering to a more hard to turn at high speeds, this is still today a very classy car and expensive if working without a problem

The biturbo engine was only based on the SM engine, but it was completely different, not only was an SOHC instead a DOHC, but also the position of the valve timing chain, 3 valves per cylinder instead 2 etc etc

wow , the production quality is amazing for such a new channel imma hit the sub button so I can enjoy it before it turns to shit by sponsors and advertisers

I don't see the relation between the 1973 oil crisis and the dwindling sales of luxury cars. Were the rich and wealthy suddenly buying VW's and Fiat's because of the gas guzzling cars?

Whoa! Man how much was that car at that time? Those features were way ahead at that time.

Cooler thsn today’s supercars, frankly not too hard to do.

Nice

You're "Diving" into it because you generally couldn't "Drive" them much when new...now that they are in their 50's, good luck with that! Citroen bought Maserati back then, just lopped 2 cylinders off the V8. So it's a French-Italian product (much like Stellantis garbage today!) that, although it aimed high, failed to hold up

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AI generated writing, AI generated voice, random Citroen SM and Citroen DS videos pulled. The SM was not a car from the future, and it was a cr@pbox back in the day, and is worse today. It's complicated technical systems including the hydromatic suspension were wonderful innovations but built 'off course', with your well known french lazy uninterested build quality and attention. In other words, instead of using proper materials, they used way too cheap materials that failed even faster. Making it beyond unreliable and worst of it all, because of the complicated system, it was not cheap but expensive to repair and maintain. It was complicated in the 70s, it's worse in the 2020s, as it's now a 50 plus year old car and parts are virtually non-existent. On top of that, the french roads are sh*t today, and were even worse sh*t back in the day, which made the strain on the car even worse back in the day. Today, 'lovers of classics' snatch up these cars whom are mostly not from France, but live in countries where the roads are vastly better, like the Netherlands and Germany. All viewed with a unobjective eye. Apart from complicated, these systems failed many times, and on top of that the cars were large, long, and hard to park with not that great visibility and the materials weren't luxurious at all, especialyl considering the bonkers buying price of this vehicle in the 70s. It's ride was not 'like on glass' (what kind of stupid AI phrase is that anyway), it was like a boat riding on way too big waves and made occupants road sick and nauseous. To make matters worse, it rusted like crazy. In reality, this car, in the 70s especially, was a greatly overpriced, greatly complicated, unreliable, unpractical, uneconomical, low build quality car from a brand on the verge of potential bankruptcy, from a brand that only dusty, boring, uninterested, old people might have interest in, in an ever changing technical market, where you could buy reliable, comfortable, sporty, cheaper, very economical, and cheap to maintain cars (especially from Japan), and Citroen made an expensive dancing block. this video is clearly AI made by somebody that has not even the slightest clue what the car actually really was.

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