On Sunday 11 October 2026 at 7 pm, Citroën unveiled the 2 CV Concept, the electric reinterpretation of its best known car. The reveal took place the day before the Paris Motor Show opened its doors, with the public welcomed from 12 to 18 October. What was shown is a concept: the production version is announced for late 2028, starting at 15,000 euros.
The date was no accident. The original 2CV was presented at the Paris Salon on 7 October 1948. Seventy eight years later, it returns to the same place, within four days. Citroën also says the production version will be shown at the 2028 edition of the show, the model’s 80th anniversary.
What Citroën confirmed
| Name | Citroën 2 CV Concept |
|---|---|
| Reveal | Sunday 11 October 2026 at 7 pm, the day before the Paris Motor Show opened |
| Status | Concept. Production version announced for late 2028 |
| Length | 3.76 m, a city car shorter than the C3 |
| Width and height | 1.68 m without the mirrors, 1.57 m tall |
| Weight | Under one tonne, the target set by the brand |
| Powertrain | All electric |
| Target price | From 15,000 euros for the production version |
| Production | In Europe. Citroën has not named the plant |
| Platform | Stellantis « E-Car » programme, the same base as the future Fiat Panda |
Xavier Chardon, head of Citroën, summed up the exercise in one sentence: « Reinventing the 2 CV isn’t about replicating a car from the past; it’s about reinventing what made it unique: its simplicity, its accessibility and the freedom it offered. » His design lead, Antoine Gaillot-Drevon, puts the same idea another way: « We didn’t want to do a retro or revival design. We managed to bring it into a modern place. »
The final design, and an interior that takes risks
The signatures of the original are there without being copied: a ribbed bonnet, round LED headlights standing proud of the curved wings, a fabric roof, separate bumpers that can be replaced one at a time, and vertical rear lights on either side of the window. The show colour is called « Rouge Infra Red ».
The interior is where the concept takes the most liberties: a removable front bench, a detachable basket where the centre console would normally sit, a single spoke steering wheel, an 8 inch touchscreen with comic book graphics, and a speaker you can take with you, named « Radioën ». The stated logic is to take out weight in order to shrink the battery and its cost, and therefore the price.
A car that stopped in 1990, not in the distant past
You often read that the 2CV disappeared half a century ago. That is wrong, and the gap matters if you want to understand why so many people still remember being behind the wheel of one. The last 2CV left the Mangualde plant in Portugal on 27 July 1990. It was a Charleston. Production therefore lasted forty two years, and the car has been gone for thirty six years, not fifty.
The volumes explain the rest. The passenger version was built in 3,867,932 units between 1948 and 1990. The van adds 1,246,299 units between 1951 and 1981, and the four wheel drive Sahara 694 units. Counting the whole derived family, Ami, Dyane, Acadiane and Méhari, Citroën goes past 9.2 million vehicles.
That is what makes the exercise hard for the brand: a car sold on that scale is not a niche collector’s item, it is a collective memory. Every single styling detail will be measured against the original.
What Citroën still has not said
The reveal leaves several gaps, and it is better to name them than to fill them in:
- No power output and no battery capacity. Both figures are still missing.
- Range is not official. One specialist outlet reports a little over 200 km on the WLTP cycle for the entry version, while three others write that the brand has given no figure at all. We are not picking a side.
- The plant is not named. Production is announced in Europe, and the Pomigliano d’Arco site in Italy has been circulating for months without any confirmation from the brand.
- The gap between concept and production car is still wide open. Two years separate them, and that is usually when retro door handles and period wheel designs quietly disappear.
What about Bordeaux?
A very affordable electric city car changes nothing about what we do, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It does change the backdrop: in a city centre where driving gets harder every year, the private car is a live subject again. We set out those constraints in our guide to getting around Bordeaux when driving becomes a chore.
For the rest, our job still applies to the journeys where you want neither to drive nor to look for a parking space: the airport, the station, days out of town. Our ideas for those days are gathered on the day trips from Bordeaux page, and the full price list is on the rates page.