The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked headlights.
The argument for the countryside need of a modern SUV usually cites reliability and safety, and in 2026, modern complexity is the enemy of reliability. If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench. If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff). Like take the C15 and add 2-4 decades of manufacturing and safety improvements, while keeping it simple and utilitarian.
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.
1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.
2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.
The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).
Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.
The stripped down base models don't sell well.
Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.
The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.
It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
Safety improvement means larger crumple zones, reinforcement, etc... Which mean a bigger and heavier vehicle if you want to keep the same capacity. That in turn means a more powerful engine, brakes, wheels and tyres, etc... further increasing the size and weight of the vehicle. This is an exponential factor.
Fuel economy and environmental stuff (which are linked) come with tighter engine control for better combustion and cleaner exhaust. It means tighter tolerances so simple tools may be less appropriate, and electronics.
And there are comfort elements that are hard to pass nowadays: A/C, power steering, door lock and windows. Mandatory safety equipment like airbags and ABS. Even simple cars like what Dacia makes are still bigger, heavier and more complex than older cars like the C15, they don't really have a choice.
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.
The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
Modularity would be great too. Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types. Meanwhile, all this has been overtaken by the need to get away from fossil fuels as soon as we practically can. Oil should not be valued based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground but based on the cost of creating a liter of it from raw materials (CO2, lots of energy).
Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
Modern engines are generally more reliable, yes. And galvanised steel and aluminium has helped chassis' and bodies last longer too. I think the 'sweet spot' has passed for most car categories though, the last being city cars when they got mandatory infotainment systems towards the end of the 2010s.
Declining service revenue has been a problem for car dealerships for a long time. EVs are only making it even harder as their maintenance needs are reduced further.
This is another topic where people look back on the past with rose colored glasses. At the risk of downvotes, this happens a lot on HN like in threads where people speak about their pre-SSD era computers as being faster and snappier than modern machines. I recently found my old laptop in storage and booted it up. I remember loving how fast it was at the time and being glad I spent extra for the fastest model at the time, but oh boy was it slow relative to anything I use today.
> If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
I could. My wife couldn't.
Also, let's not forget the creature comforts of modern cars... rear seats, airbags, sound insulation, power steering, automatic transmissions, 4wd.
Living in the country, tool-vehicles are very useful. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Because she doesn't drive a C15. Believe me, rural french women _will_ fix a C15. There's nothing to break down anyways, the engine is happy to run on distilled corn and melted rubber for oil, the suspension is what suspension, three tires ought to be enough for everyone.
> rear seats,
There's rear benches for you whole family and space for your kids to play around in the back while you're driving, what more do you want ?
Grab a phase 3, it has power steering. Or get stronger arms. Or stop trying to steer while you're not moving forward.
> automatic transmissions
You don't need automatic transmissions, you need to learn how to drive stick. The C15 has the added benefit that you don't really have a proper range to change gears, it'll just go in. Actually you don't even need to clutch, just jam the thing.
>4wd
Absolutely useless for 100% of the usages the average american makes of it. If it can drive through mud while carrying cows, it will handle anything you have to throw at it. 4WD sure is a nice thing to make you pay for more gas though.
>Living in the country, it's very useful to own a tool-vehicle. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Alright, all kidding aside though: the US is literally the only country in the world that considers pickup trucks as a good utility vehicle: they are the most dogshit type of vehicle you could own for anything, and that includes your sheets of plywood. Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world. Need to carry a bunch of crap ? Buy a busted Renault Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Master) and it has the added benefit of you being able to buy your plywood in crazy situations like the tiniest bits of rain.
The US's obsession for pickup trucks is the sign of a deeply unserious society.
The Toyota Hilux makes for a good vehicle to mount weapons in the back, but please see a lawyer about the legality of mounting an M60 at the back of your car if you're not living in Afghanistan
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool.
I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importance and focus, cars have become unconditional necessities in many places.
I think the reason, you frequently see "old cars as tools" in southern Europe still, is the fact most regions there only started industrialization after 1970 and were/are still greatly underdeveloped/relatively poor, compared to eg. early industrialized nations like Germany, which are super car-centric. They suffered less car adaptation at the time and as a consequence e.g. SUVs would be rather impractical in some places with extremely narrow streets. Additionally, (remaining) farmers in e.g. Germany are almost exclusively rather rich entrepreneurs managing industrialized food production on flat, boring lands, than "poor peasants" caring for traditional farms in remote villages living off tourism somewhere pretty.
Probably less due to zeitgeist/mentality, but rather geography, historic economic abilities and availability.
Can you give an example of a European city that was "torn down and rebuilt to fit the car?"
In my experience, even cities that suffered a lot of war time damage (Hamburg, Dresden) were rebuilt with every street in exactly the same place with the same narrow width.
My driving skills are probably below average. I really like that my car warns me of zebra crossings and can follow the car in front of me with a safe distance.
Many of the modern car features are just useless marketing fluff, but there is some really good progress too.
I’ve got two cars that I drive regularly, a modern day BMW with all the bells and whistles, and an almost 20 year old Honda
Acty Van. It’s 660cc, doesn’t have rear seat belts, or a radio, it does have power windows though.
I enjoy driving both for different purposes, but I have to agree with you. On long distance driving (>200km), the BMW is safer. Cruise control, lane keeping, auto distance. It really makes long, multi hour drives less tiring.
Because of the growth imperative. With essential things like ICE cars, phones and personal computing, we long satisfied need, those core business products are simply essentially finished/perfected. It's market, and therefore regulatory, failure to have gigantic corporations in positions enabling rent seeking and market shaping, instead of pushing true innovation. If Apple can't come up with something innovative, they need to be forced to downscale instead of creating artificial demand for essentially the same phone 5 years in a row. If VW repeatedly missed the chance to get off their obsolete engine platform, they need to fail.
I think, Cory Doctorow's idea for regaining digital resilience, by "simply" opening up artificial software restrictions through regulation, is widely applicable and would also push for adequate downscaling and actual innovation: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
This article is comparing a C15 new in 1984 vs a secondhand one today. Really, the C15 represents a time when taxes were ~20% lower and there was a workable steel industry in Europe (which destroyed certain environments, especially around the Ruhrgebiet, whether the exact location was in France, Belgium or Germany). Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one. You can enter with a Berlingo.
There is still a "C15" by the way. It's even less ugly. It's called the Berlingo [1]. Cheapest version is 24000euro + tax, or 35000 + tax for the hybrid version. Let's say in practice it'll run you 30000 euro.
In other words, after tax and counting inflation, let's summarize that since 1984, European cars have about doubled in price. Wages in the EU have gone up about 2x, after inflation.
You have to work 30000/2600 (avg wage per month, euros, in France) = just shy of an entire year of work if you invested 100% of your wage into the car. So let's say 2 years of work.
(due to the EU strongly opposing equal wages across the EU, there is a very large difference between average wage in France and, say, Greece. VERY large, more than 100%)
In 1977, you would have 4900FF average wage in France (in French Francs), and the C15 cost 62000FF. So, just about 12 months at 100% average wage, or let's say 2 years or work, saving up.
So, it even costs about the same.
And, sadly, one is forced to admit that when it comes to European cars, this is a pretty damn good result for that company. Most EU brands have done far worse.
> Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one.
At least in Germany, due to it's age it would classify as a historic vehicle (number plate with an H) and be exempt from emission standards.
There are years-long threads dozens of pages long on priuschat.com with data files posted by wizards just to figure out the 12v charging pattern.
The vehicle itself will probably stop running before any of these wizards ever figure that out, or even understand the algorithm it uses to occasionally run the engine in EV mode.
And yet, I speculate the total runtime of any year of that vehicle will match what you see for the much simpler Citroen C15-- essentially, bounded only by however long the wizard wants to drive it.
Edit: preemptively-- the Prius driver can drive their Prius on roads appropriate for that type of vehicle for as long as they want. Citroen obviously can go more places-- my upshot is just that the glaring complexity of a Prius doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of its reliability as the author assumes it should have.
I think chances are vastly better now with EVs, you probably could reuse the crowdfunded opensource washing machine. Combustion engines are simply way, way too complex. Although I presume the real showstopper is control electronics and regulatory approval for ICEs and EVs alike.
You have cameras, sensors, gps, maps, that need to be updated... and all that would easily be solved by a few policemen with radar guns and writing fines.
What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect at all costs from scratches even.
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect
Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.
They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
>They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode
Which means they are some of the most polluting and wasteful cars available. ECUs are good. They make cars safer, more reliable and more efficient. Car manufacturers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add adblue, because the Diesel engines are pretty toxic otherwise.
The apologia for old cars is just insane, they are not what you think they are.
>If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
No, you just reset the ECU and get on with your day.
With all due respect, you are confusing a software race condition with a hard fault in a safety critical system.
Resetting the ECU only works if the error is a transient glitch in the code logic. If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Furthermore, modern automotive architectures store permanent diagnostic trouble codes in non volatile memory specifically to prevent people from "just resetting it" to bypass emissions or safety checks. You cannot clear those with a battery pull. You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
But more importantly, your argument accepts a terrifying premise. That a 2.5 ton kinetic object moving at highway speeds should have the reliability profile of a consumer router. If I have to treat my vehicle like a frozen windows 98 desktop to get home, the automotive engineering has failed me. Physics doesn't need a reboot.
This. I think the entire argument and comparison is a fallacy because you can't just compare vehicles on utilitarian factors when many (most?) people are buying primarily based on fashion/aesthetics. Through my American eyes that C15 is dog shit ugly and I don't even care to read through how it measures up on utility because it's style is already a dealbreaker.
Personally-I know I don't need a big truck, and don't have farm/ranch/heavy duty requirements, but SUVs are quite useful for normal city life in most of the US. Several times a month I am fully loaded for some reason or another. May as well be fashionable and handle well too since this is also the vehicle I commute in and valet at a fancy restaurant occasionally.
I noticed that people often treat cars as they treat clothes. It's their largest and most expensive costumes.
This means that fashion and looks start to play a major role, utility be damned. This also means that relatively minor details, like the exact shape of headlights, become a major stylistic and thus market niche differentiator.
I don't think it's a new problem with cars. But it maybe relatively new in the utility / light truck space.
My first car I got in Germany was a C15. I used it to transport server racks, but also had a mattress in the back and had my first sex on it. On muddy festivals where others cars got stuck, I was able to get out easily. Repairs were dirt cheap. It also had a tow bar, and was able to pull a 1.5 metric ton trailer to get equipment to a computer party.
And I still was able to do 160 km/h (100 MPH) with it on the Autobahn. With or without server racks, with or without sex.
Best car I ever had.
It is really insane that these days cars on average weigh 25-40 times of their load. Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
At first I wanted to write a comment about how cars and sex are apparently very well linked. Upon thinking it over once more, it appears that the real link to sex is privacy, which is of course obvious. Thinking over it once more, we're brought back to the real selling point of cars: total privacy. Public transport is on paper really good, but it is totally devoid of privacy - which means that it is bad in reality. In other more provocative words, public transportation is bad because you can't have sex on the bus
Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters. And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.
Also, I survived.
And when it comes to security features, more important than not having side airbags would have been not to combine smoking weed and fellatio while doing 160.
I am not saying that any of this would be a good idea if keeping your life is a priority.
But even with maniacs like myself on the road, Germany has deaths from fatal car crashes of 3-4 per 100,000, while the US has 12-13.
But again, I am not a lawyer, not a doctor, and this is not health advise, just a true story of what I did 25 years ago that may or may not entertain readers.
> The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US. A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing.
The craziest thing about this criticism is that it is phrased as hyperbole but the reality is that this is seen as a small truck in the US.
The Ford Ranger actually is the best selling pickup truck in Europe for 10 straight years, but doesn’t sell as much in the US. The larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more in the US.
The best part about the F-150 is that it isn't even toddlers at that point. The most common F-150 variant I see in my area's hood goes up to my shoulder and I'm 2 meters tall.
You often see the very important people driving these working their way through crowded parking lots and places that are primarily foot traffic with a "Wtach out for ME!" driving style.
It's so funny that when people design vehicles that actually have a need to be big - big buses, commercial vans, fire trucks - one of their common features is that visibility is treated as something important, and often these types of vehicles have either a nearly flat, uniform front side, or they try to minimize the engine compartment hump as much as possible and make the windshield huge. But when we talk about cars that are made for the consumer, all sanity goes out the window, we get these near-caricatures that would be hilarious if they weren't real. The craziness can only be somewhat tamed by government restrictions, depending on where you live, but the peak of this design results in huge, elevated flat boxes for engine compartments, mounted as high as possible. It doesn't matter that the driver has a blind spot in every direction, what matters is showing off how HUGE your 18L V32 engine must surely be under that hood, how powerful it must be to draw air through that chrome grille that's half a person's height, and most importantly, how much of an imposing heroic warrior one must be to own that tank.
I'm probably one of the few people in this thread who are actually truck shopping right now
The ranger is a great option for most people but one of my capabilities for the truck is to bring my bike to motorcycle track days. Usually I'd only take a single motorcycle, however track days are more fun with friends. to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.[0]
that leaves only the bigger 1500 class trucks as options for me, and why I'm going with an F150
> to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.
can't you position one bike facing forward and one facing back, so the handlebars don't collide? Either way, going with an absurdly big and dangerous car to avoid _awkwardly positioning_ some cargo is pretty American thing to do
Don't know why you are down voted. People just assume that you have a place to store a trailer (and truck and motorcycle).
As to your choice of the Ford,as a rural late model (2018) F-150 owner, I'd encourage you to consider something else. A used Tundra V8 or one of the GMC/Chevy's. My mechanic is thumbs down on the Rams longer term.
I've had nothing but stupidity with this F-150 and all I do is personal plowing and a few loads of gravel or dirt each year. Granted, my steep dirt road can be very rough in mud season. But I've now spent about 8K in non-maintenance repairs.
I say this as a past owner of multiple mustangs and rangers - I'm done with Ford.
A lot of commenters saying you "need" a trailer (instead of an F150), but another option would be one bike in the bed and the second bike (if needed) on a hitch-mounted rack. A hitch rack takes less space to store when you're not using it than a full trailer. It would probably be more annoying to load and unload than just putting two bikes in the bed.
Anyway, if you want an F150, get it -- I don't really care.
This is dumb, I've lost count of how many times I've hauled multiple motorcycles somewhere and you know how I do it? A trailer. It's easier and safer to load and unload, which is why almost everyone else does that as well.
If you want an 'image' purchase just own up to it. Your post hoc justifications don't really hold water.
> The Ford Ranger actually sells better in Europe than it does in the US. And the larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more.
Do you have any sources for this? I looked online and found a couple of charts, none of them support this claim. The Ford Ranger sales in Europe vs US are similar (who buys more varies by year) but the F series seems to be mostly bought in US
I have a Ford F-150 (14 gen) and the front is so huge I need to step on the front grill guard to reach anything inside the engine compartment. It is all around an unreasonably sized vehicle. My excuse is that (a) I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around and (b) I work from home so no commute. But for most people who do not work construction this is an insane daily driver.
> I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around
I don’t understand this argument, as they seem incredibly impractical for that. There is very little space for ‘stuff’, there is only the uncovered bed which is relatively small. The bed is also at an awkward height so very impractical to get stuff in or out. Since the bed is open, you always have to take all your ‘stuff’ out, you can’t leave tools in there or anything of value or it will get stolen. If you put a hard cover on. it leaves even less space. And since a large part of the vehicle has no roof you cannot have a roof rack.
You do not see these used by people in construction or other trades here in Europe. They use vans. An (extended) van has an ungodly amount of lockable storage space, easily accessible with side and back doors, with a floor at a reasonable height and if that isn’t enough you with a roof rack you can strap a lot to the roof as well.
I really don’t see how something like an F-150 is more practical for ‘hauling stuff’ than something like a Mercedes Sprinter.
I did look up some numbers (used the most capable configuration I could find for each of the vehicles):
Max bed length for an F-150: 247cm
Max cargo space length for a Sprinter: 481cm
I think the F-150 is the most popular. I know many people don’t care about other’s subjective experiences, but it’s always such a mindfuck to my EU mind when I see trucks of this size.
Like my brain expects the car to finish, but there’s more car. Then it happens again and again in a quick succession. It confuses me, I shake it off. I look at the car again. The bed is empty, there’s one person in it.
Then I think „what’s the point”? And then I remember we grew up in different environments and have different expectations about how things should look like. And I still don’t fully get it.
Almost any large car will fit almost anywhere in the US, so you might as well get the car that serves even your most marginal use cases. Fuel costs are much lower than Europe, and Americans are relatively richer anyway.
From my experience, these trucks make much more sense on a road in the US. European roads are fairly small so these trucks look _even bigger_, whereas in the US everything is massive so the cars fit. Still, having to look _up_ to see the windshield is crazy and I hope it won't be normalized in the EU
Also, I would like to kindly remind you of the concept of "time". This was 25 year ago. The alternatives would have been worse. These days a C15 would be electric.
Obviously the OP is tounge-in-cheek, so keep it lightly.
But it does have merit: If you wish to measure your environmental footprint, you must look at the total lifetime of car, most importantly the manufacturing part. There is a difference between 900 KG of parts for a C15 vs 1,900 - 2400 KG for a Ford Ranger. These days most PM come from braking. Stopping 2000 KG will obviously cause more emissions from the brakes than stopping 1000 KG.
All in all, the point really is: The ratio between weight/size of the car itself and what is inside (people and/or server racks) has gotten completely out of hand. No, you do not need a 2,000 KG tank to move your 50-100 KG of flesh around. It's insanity, no matter if your care about the planet or not.
It's also unsafe. He's comparing it to a modern Ranger, not the Ranger of the same year as the C15 (which was much smaller and got better fuel economy), and he completely ignores the fact that the Citroen wasn't sold in North America.
He seems to imply there would be no appetite for one here but I disagree. In western Canada I see imported Kei trucks everywhere and these fill a similar niche!
And it weighs less than half of the other two (less than a ton), so less power is needed.
I agree though, the C15 is slower than the other two, but less than you’d perhaps think.
I own a Citroën 2CV. It has some of the same qualities: super robust, incredibly off-roady, simple mechanically, but I take my “regular car” (2017) for road trips > 100km…
I’ve done numerous long road trips in the 2CV though, before I got the other car. Some longer than 1000km.
I agree with the TFA, that many overestimate their needs, but older cars are also less luxurious - obviously!
The post is a hot take, slightly tongue-in-cheek, isn’t it? :)
That’s fair if you only account for usage emission. The compared tanks weight 2/3x as much (more ressources to extract, manufacture, transport…) and are made of intricate polymers, composites, wires & electronics… event the metal alloys are very technical (saving them to weight even more) and can’t be recycled into newer car. Old cars are mainly… steel.
I know it's a joke, but if you clip a curb or even a slightly chunky branch at 15mph in one of these EVERYONE DIES (...only partially joking)
In a crash it'll fold up like the tin can it is, even against a car of a similar vintage and size (no comment on the cows). Up against even a modern supermini and you're literal mince meat, let alone a modern SUV. At least you won't suffer long.
So if you are off roading or on a snowy road, hopefully you won't slip into a tree or roll over. Modern cars - even "small" ones -are heavier partly because they are substantially safer. A crash that would have had to have you cut out of the wreckage by the fire brigade (potentially losing a limb or two in the process) is now the sort of thing you can walk away from. Yes even in "small" modern cars (you do not need a SUV for safety).
It's night and day really - just go look at the archive on EuroNCAP.. In the crash tests that left 90s and early 2000s cars as unrecognisable mounds of broken and twisted metal (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8PTeFDaYU which was a car that was probably 10 years more advanced than the c15 in terms of safety...) now barely even break the windscreen of modern super-mini cars (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NaWVepTJTGw&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB). Amazing.
I used to drive through France in the C15 days and you'd see a lot of crashes compared to England, a lot because of the road layouts. Straight in France so people went fast through villages and the like. In England everything's twisty.
The Citroen Saxo was notably terrible. It was remarked upon even at the time, especially due to the target market of its sportier versions: foolish young men. Here's another hatchback from 2000, faring noticeably better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXNgKwWFs - not to say for a moment that you wouldn't still want a 2025 car.
I'm a big fan of the current range of French Renault electric cars.
The 5, 4, Megan and Scenic are just excellent.
I think the Scenic is probably the one I'd buy right now based on the range, 380 miles but the 5 and the 4 have so much character they're probably the first really iconic electric car designs IMHO.
Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Those who don't are not well seen in society, or left the country already.
So the best thing I'd see them excelling at in this century, if they can drive their ideology in the right direction, would be producing low-tech solutions solving 90% of problems with 20% of the costs, with open-source like tools / materials / methods everyone can replicate easily. A bit like this article about this old car.
> Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism.
Do you have anything to read up on that? This got me a little excited, but I also doubt it due to the rise of right wing populism everywhere else. Man, if France actually got the rare attitude to get shit done in these times, I may move there and help.
The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.
The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.
It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.
You know modern France has the exact same problem of billionaire lobbying and media consolidation that the US has right?
Arnault (LVMH) [0], Trappier (Dassault) [1], Niel (Illiad) [2], Lagardère (Lagardère SA) [3], Bolloré (Bolloré Group) [4] and a couple others have an inordinate amount of control over French politics. It's also why whenever a country like China, the US, India, or others wants to hold the EU by the balls, they end up tariffing Congac, because Arnault's LVMH has a near monopoly on Congac production in France, so he almost always pressures Macron into acquiesing because otherwise he would threaten to back the RN.
Both France and the US are similarly ranked flawed democracies [5] with similar dysfunctions.
Also, immediately following the revolution, the guillotiners ended up doing it for the rich [6], as the French Revolution ended up leading to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule with le Directoire, Napoleon, Napoleon III, and others. The only thing you learn from the French Revolution is the same thing you learn from Tahrir Square - the house always wins, which in political science is modeled via Selectorate Theory [7] and Veto Players [8].
Sadly, it's the same reason why despite mass protest after mass protest, the Iranian regime hasn't fallen - the primary political and economic veto players in Iran (Army, IRGC, Basij, Police, Clergy, Business leadership, SoE leadership, Bonyad leadership) haven't defected because they have more to lose than gain if a revolution succeeded. The moment a handful of these interests think they can expand their presence under a new regime is when you would see Khamenei fall, but the leadership would end up being the same ba***rds anyhow, just like how the Islamic Republic ended up co-opting and rehabilitating army officers and business leadership from the Shah's regime during the Iran-Iraq War and after the cultural revolution.
The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission).
Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.
I had a Renault Kangoo and was similarly militant about its supremacy. It was a cheap, reliable thing and people carrier. It could fit five people, or two people, two bicycles and plenty of camping gear. It was cheap and ugly enough to shrug about cosmetic damage, so I never worried about kicking the doors shut or sitting on the roof. It was also tiny and easy to drive and park. It was mechanically simple and reliable.
It broke down recently at 18 years of age and I can't justify maintaining a car in Berlin, but I loved that car to bits.
I remember in Belgium when the laws pushed for lower CO2, and you got an influx of all these diesel engines, as you couldn't get that low with gasoline engines (that had some power).
But a few years later people came to the realization that CO2 is the least bad of the global warming gasses, and those diesel engines emitted a lot of NOx.
Every year there was a distance that you'd have to drive before diesel made sense (as you get more miles out of a gallon, and it was cheaper per gallon).
That number kept on creeping up due to new diesel taxes, and the fact that diesel is no longer cheaper per unit than gas.
Most people who live in rural Britain today are still getting around in hatchbacks or estates (station wagons, to use the American term). The enormous SUVs are almost entirely driven by people who've used their money to buy into the countryside aesthetic.
No. He's not comparing US vs France, you read that into it. He's comparing a car from 1985 (which happens to be French) to a car from 2025 (which happens to be made in the US).
You're attributing the difference to different countries, but everyone else here sees it's mostly it's from a different era.
There's the Citroen Nemo. It's a more compact version and I believe closer in size to the older panel vans. The new Berlingos are wider and taller than they used to be.
My favorite C15 story is with my childhood friend who got it as a hand-me-down first car, we used to put plastic lawn chairs in the back and head to the beach...
The gas meter was broken, so my friend had to guesstimate when he needed a refill.
At one point it was stolen, but then found a week later on the side of the highway,out of gas..
First off, I agree with the point made, though I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru. The people I know who have to deal with excessive snow or mud on country roads commonly opt for that. Of course there’s the “men” who compensate for their lack of buldge with 350s, dualies, etc. If you don’t work a farm, those whips are dummm.
That was a good perspective though- I grew up hearing Citroen makes garbage.
Side note- The vast majority of pollution is from industry. By a lot. That is where the finger needs to be pointing. Pointing the finger at SUV drivers distracts from the real issue and keeps us blaming each other.
> I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru
Yeah, I get this is tongue-in-cheek but if you're going to try to convince Americans of this idea, you need to use units we understand, and a car we've heard of.
Maybe that's why Subarus are stereotyped as a lesbian car in the US. Instead of grandstanding, they "get the job done" (as the Chappell Roan song goes).
Unless you’re in the Pacific Northwest, in which case, they are issued to every new resident (myself included). Traded in my Ford Explorer for a Subaru Outback and could not be happier.
I don't know if it is some much 'compensating' as it is a "look at my toy" showing off type of thing which isn't really directed at women. When I drive around metro areas it is pretty clear that the large majority of trucks are "house" trucks - they are never used for truck things. They are washed, waxed with nice shiny black tires.
Don't get me wrong - if you got the dough, by all means drive what you want. But most truck owners could get by with something else just as well.
Top gear driving to the magnetic north pole in Hiluxes was impressive. I figure those would compete. They were a bit non standard. (vid https://youtu.be/q0hoPNmY4oU)
Indeed, light and 4x4 is the best combo. I think the Citroen 2CV was pretty impressive as well and they did have that dual engine version (though it was never sold to the public).
Designed in the era of Use-maxing vs Status-maxing. I think modern cars are taking a lot of car experience out and putting in the phone experience in. My Maruti Suzuki 800 was such a fun car to drive. Easy to repair. Decently efficient. Repair manual was understandable.
The new electrics are great. But they are less of a car and more of a transportation technology.
It’s incredibly grating to get into my mom’s car and see a FYP on her dashboard with podcast recs. It makes me feel like I woke up on the moon. It just makes no sense and it’s clearly harder (for her, and in general) to use than an old-school car radio.
It doesn’t help (but still besides the point) that they typically give the impression of being a stripped back Moto G4 a couple years out of updates.
That's hilarious. The German version (VW Caddy) is similar. Citroen at some point had a van version of the 2CV and the Diane, this is the continuation of that tradition.
Literally: the C15 was based on the Visa (clearly, when you look at it!), and was the first platform-shared vehicle between Citroen and Peugeot where it was basically a Peugeot warmed over with some additional eccentricity. Not bad, overall though.
Sorry for going counter to the narrative, but I had a friend who had an early 2000s Citroen which was made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation - and I tell you, by the stories he told, they deserved it.
There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times.
He contemplated setting it on fire rather than selling it, not wanting the next lucky owner to go through the same stuff he did.
> made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation
A reputation well earned IMO…
> There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times
French cars have a philosophy of more maintenance than German cars. On the other hand, Frenchy spare parts are often cheaper and easier to replace.
E.g. a timing belt replacement on PSA HDI takes just a few hours and costs €2-300. On a VAG TDI, the same procedure is almost a full day at a (competent) workshop and costs ~5-10x as much.
It's a global pandemic of oversized cars. People love SUVs because it makes them feel powerful and successful. Explanations why they need them are generally along the lines of "because we have kids" (but SUVs don't actually have that much space), or "because heavier means safer" (well yes, at the cost of others).
I love small cars, in fact I owned a Fiat 500 for a number of years and a number of small VWs. With that said, it really grinds my gears (Pun intended) when Europeans want to lecture Americans about large cars.
Our roads are bigger, gas is dirt cheap, parking is plentiful and spacious outside dense metros, and the RAM 1500 I own is 100x more useful no mater how you want to try and spin the facts. I can tow a large trailer with my Jeep on it, a large RV, boats, etc. It is highly capable off roading on technical terrain here in Utah. It’s also insanely comfortable and luxurious on road trips and has enough room to lay on the rear bench seat as if it were a bed. I truly use all of the capabilities in a niche that almost no other vehicle besides a standard size truck occupies.
You know all those dark patterns in software? What if we applied the same concepts to gigantic mechanical devices, taking advantage of human psychological faults, and generate a profit margin on those? Sure seems what seems to have happened with motor vehicles
> But what if you're an environmentally conscious mother who needs to drive the 5 minute walk to your kids' school? Surely, a modern car must be less polluting?
> CO2 emissions/km:
No, you have already compared fuel consumption. This is equivalent.
My family hired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izh_2715 in eastern Europe to move furniture few times. It was usually referred as "Pirojok", which can be translated as stuffed bun.
My dad got rid of his C15 after driving 1 million kilometers with it (rural France)
The engine was fine surprisingly, the body was rusted to the bone though
Can't imagine producing and selling this under the current regulations (and not just the crash-worthiness). I with they and C15 move towards each other...
To be fair to the SUV they weren't really a thing in France before 2 decades after the C15. To be fair to the C15 the main buyers of SUV at the beginning were urban and suburban moms that wanted to show they had money and we're feeling better in big and tall cars
I’ve been a passenger in the front and the back of a C15 and they are pure utility vehicule. You get heating in winter and ventilation in summer. The windows are manual, front seat are okay, and I don’t know if they have updated models with aircon before stopping the production.
Unrelated to the article: What I find frustrating about mastodon is how I click a link and then cannot favorite a post as there's no unified login between federated servers.
I have the Ford Ranger with the 2 litre biturbo diesel engine in Australia. It is so good it's hard to conceive that a better vehicle could be possible.
Well, it never breaks as in: it will always get you to where you need to go because the engine just keeps running. Broken driveshaft? Stick a vice grip on it and keep rolling... And they're easy to repair because there isn't a lot in them to begin with, so you have a lot of room to work. Running gear wears and needs fixing but the core is nigh on indestructible. Same with the VW diesels from that era, the 1.9 mechanical.
If you are person that doesn’t give a fuck about keeping up with Jones’s you just buy whatever does the job.
I could drive much better car but I don’t have to impress my neighbors.
Still with non-impressive car I get pushed around on the road by guys in big and impressive cars. But also I drive on defense anyway so I get them to go far away from me by letting them pass.
I am quite fit though not super big or anything and car I drive is attributable to old geezers or ladies. Once guy jumped out of the car to shout at me he took his tone two notches down quickly.
So technically you might be right but still there is whole human experience to deal with.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not in the same way as what I was thinking. It's not about impressiveness - as in, a show of wealth or status. It's all about size. This is a relatively small car, but as far as I can tell, back in the day all of them were considerably smaller, even the ones that were pricey and designed to look cool or expensive. Nowadays, the most obnoxious and dangerous car drivers have united with the most hands-off governments and manufacturers willing to pander to them exclusively to create an arms race of building the biggest megatank that can fit within a lane and only occupy six parking spots at once.
Off topic: That comma in the title really grates on me. It's supposed to be "dramatic pause" or something, but it can also be read as "pause while I check my notes to remember what the name of this thing actually is".
Hat tip to Joel Garreau, from whom I stole this reading of that kind of comma.
This is pretty tiresome, however the article is mostly correct. If I could get one of these and own it and drive it in the US, I would. I certainly don't want an over-expensive, over-weight, over-featured monstrosity, but that's all anyone sells in the US.
The Peugeot XUD engine that powers the Citroën C15 (and a whole bunch of other European cars of similar vintage) is what most of the small Ford diesels were based on, right until they got into the "wet belt" nonsense.
I have "repaired" one that was used to power a small fishing boat (it came out of a Xantia, and the hydraulic pump was used to operate the shooting gear). The boat sank and the engine compartment was flooded with sea water for about a week. It started up and ran quite happily after draining what was approximately a 50/50 mix of sea water and sludgy engine oil and putting fresh in, then removing the injectors and cranking it to blow the water out of the cylinders.
It never quite ran right after that and was hard to start, and five or six years later the boat's owner replaced it with another Xantia engine, this time the turbocharged version.
I always had BMWs, like I only ever bought reasonably high-end BMWs, but when we bought our place in Ireland, I needed a vehicle on Swiss plates and insurance (for legal reasons) to use there when car rental in Ireland was running crazy money. I had a look on the Swiss classifieds sites for anything "rechtslenker" (right-hand drive) and found two Rolls Royces, a clapped out MG, and about 15 yellow ex-Swiss Post Renault Kangoo 2-seat car-based cargo vans. (I guess they wanted their mailmen to be able to step out onto the curb, hence RHD in a LHD country?) I bought the van. Weird config: right hand drive, but configured for right-hand traffic, meaning I had to replace the headlights and fog light and get it re-aligned to fit in. Automatic transmission, 1.6L petrol engine, no airbag, no wheel lock, no AC, knobs and switches, glass all around like the MPV version, but a cargo floor. It's insanely simple, the parts are practically free from the perspective of a BMW fanatic, and it's actually a hoot to drive. When we moved, I imported it with our stuff, and it's our only car now. Hauls firewood like you wouldn't believe, and tows a large 2.5m x 1.25m x 1.2m single-axle box trailer without complaints, meaning I can (and have done) shift all the sheets of plywood and drywall I need without buying a pickup. We live way out in the countryside, where the roads have grass up the middle and potholes down both sides, but the Kangoo's ground clearance is enough (especially when empty) that it's never been an issue. I hardly miss the BMW. A little French van is all you need.
> Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
Sure why not? Because they made that comment? It’s not that they buy trucks because they are much taller than a short person but they still are. I’d rather not live next to the person with the dangerous truck.
If you can read people, you know a person like this is going to be constantly invading your privacy, inventing conflicts and complaining. Probably trying to make you join in his vendetta against some neighbour, and if you decline he will make a vendetta behind your back against you.
These kind of people are so easy to spot once you have some experience.
Their cynicism is cope. They are witnessing their own decline every single day.
It's honestly so sad. On the other side of the globe there is Tesla [1]. Even if you don't like the idea of cars, this is the pinnacle of a utilitarian product. Also one of the most popular vehicles (globally) as opposed to the (incorrect) example used in the thread.
Modern cars are great for the most parts. More comfortable, more safe, more autonomous, bigger, better and faster. Of course not all cars are created equal.
Cars are a resilient mode of transport. Even if road maintenance stops for 30 years due to some kind of crisis, a society with cars will be way more functional than one that was solely reliant on a centralized transportation system. And this is not an unrealistic scenario, people are just used to the last 80 years of peace due to rapid economic growth and globalization.
Electric cars could have paved the way to practical, utilitarian vehicles through their less-moving-parts, simpler nature. Instead, what we got were IoT gadgets on wheels, and Tesla is a pinnacle of that. It's about as far from a utilitarian product as you can get. Every modern Tesla vehicle is a definition of software-over-hardware and form-over-function. In your hypothetical 30 year apocalypse scenario, no one would be driving a Tesla, because their "utilitarian" Steam Early Access-like self-driving would cease once people can no longer pay the subscription fee for it, their single-point-of-failure screens break with no way to replace them (after all, the utilitarian designers were most concerned with making it look cool rather than lasting a long time), and because the overcomplicated door handles would stop working, as again, it was worth it for how cool they looked. In addition to 1000 other issues, like if they happened to get stuck on a bad software revision that breaks some random feature. "Most fast and break things" for cars, now that's utilitarianism. Tesla's physical build quality is widely known as being some of the worst in the market of luxury new cars. Nothing about them is conducive to longevity. In your apocalypse where there is no road maintenance and no spare parts, we'd be driving either the barebones self-propelled transport (bikes and such), or the absolute simplest cars you can fix yourself, such as... the subject of this thread, for instance. Or really, many similar cars from that era which that thing represents. Modern cars have gotten better in many regards - efficiency or safety-oriented design, for example - but in others, they've gotten so, so much worse. Longevity and repairability is down, what's in is hammering subscription-based, DRMed, badly designed things-as-a-service into every industry, including the automotive industry. That's what people are cynical about.
> They are witnessing their own decline every single day. It's honestly so sad.
What is so sad is being so stuck-up in whatever opinions you have as to think that people cannot genuinely in good faith have opinions other than yours, that everyone must surely know this objective truth you believe and that it's everyone else who's insanely deluding themselves from confronting this reality that you in your wisdom bring to them.
the neighbour with a big-ass truck will help you shovel your drive-way, and invite you to a barbecue. This guy will leave an angry note on your door because you forgot your porch light on, or infringed on his laundry time.
Just to be clear: I was a kid at that time and although the Citroen 2CV was a cool looking car the C15 was just as fugly back then as it is today. A fucking fuglier than fugly piece of ugly shit that was, already back then, making the world uglier for everybody.
I don't dispute that it was useful and reliable: I remember the milkman and plumbers and electricians having these. Note that some had a 2CV and would just cut off the roof (don't tell me it wasn't a thing: I've got pictures of me as a kid in a 2CV whose roof was cut).
Only the french have the "taste" to create such uglyness as the C15. It's hard to understand how a country can both produce the Concorde and the C15.
Even the russian and their Lada brand never managed to create something as fugly as the 4L or the C15.
Now you'll excuse me but I've got to take a look at what nature produces:
Because that C15 brings back memories from a traumatizing time where uglyness was ruling the world.
P.S: I owned a Citroen VISA: it's hard to tell if it was only the 2nd ugliest Citroen ever after the C15 (indisputably the fugliest of them all) because Citroen produced soooo many turds.
When we lived in a more rural area, and I drove my kids to school each morning (in a normal-sized sedan), I taught them to notice the contents of the SUVs they saw. The common pattern, like 90% of the time in the morning, was a lady driver in a spotless SUV with a kid in the very back row of seats.
And the demographics made sense: you’d expect to see more moms dropping off kids, at least in redder parts of the country, and the back row is supposed safest (as long as you only plan on getting into head-on collisions). Still, the common theme of a ridiculous vehicle with exactly 2 occupants sitting in the farthest possible positions from each other came to be funny to us.
Those ludicrous pavement princess pieces of junk are status symbols of conspicuous consumption, and that’s it.
Now, a pickup with tool racks or lumber in the back, or covered with drywall dust, or bearing a ranch sticker? Fine. Those make perfect sense. Anything short of that is just bragging about how much you love donating to Exxon, like an NRA sticker but dumber.
I do get heat for my truck.
I call it the truckasourus, it does take up a lot of room, I pulled out the rear seat and installed a three level shelf that fills the whole back of the cab, tools, grocieries, more tools, laundry, more food, and room on the top shelf to sleep if nessesary, then a 8 foot box, that will get replaced with a 9' flat deck, and front, middle and rear racks so I can move 24'steel, 4x8 sheets, welding gas, and whatever else, when I am not moving round bales or fire wood, other large heavy clumsy stuff.
funny thing is that I have a car just for more civilised things, that costs me almost as much to sit there, as my truck costs to drive.
I flashed the eprom in the truck so it gets significantly better fuel milage, and has forgotten how to go into limp mode, though the messages in the dash are dire.
I could build a smaller rig, but it would fail in 1/3 of the tasks required, so it is impossible to come out ahead with running two, or hireing moving services.
So the article, while funny, is narrow and snippy.
Sometimes I consider a bumper sticker that would say, "Thanks for driving a Prius, I need the fuel!"
the milquetoast attempts at casting poorly-targeted stones at the beginning of this article really bring it down. Plenty of rural brits share exactly the same mentality, this just stinks of lack of cultural experience.
it's a great vehicle, and I applaud the french approach to cars.
Truly rural Brits - Northumbria, the Devon uplands, Yorkshire Moors, the remoter parts of Scotland & Wales, sure.
Thing with England is that, being a small, flat and largely well-connected country, there's lots of places that identify strongly as rural but are, economically and culturally, more like outer-suburbia in a US context. That's where you'll find the Defender and F-150 crowd.
He forgets the part where because of emissions requirements the C15 can't be driven in that scourge the people the author defends call "low emissions zones".
Stick a petrol version of the engine in (Peugeot XU instead of XUD) and convert it to run on propane. There you go, now the exhaust is just water and carbon dioxide, and you don't die from breathing it in. No CO, no HC, and not really any more NOx that was in the air it sucked in.
This is why forklifts run on gas, instead of petrol or diesel.
We could have had incredibly clean air in our cities 25 years ago, if the government hadn't decided that pushing "scrappage schemes" to get people to buy "cleaner greener diesels" was cheaper.
If you want to live in polluted areas there are plenty of places available on Earth for that, I believe most people would rather not. Low emissions zones are mostly in very densely populated areas where the impact of pollution is higher, not sure why you consider that a scourge.
People who don't live in France may not know why low emission zones are so stupid: it's not about how much pollution your car emits, but how old it is.
So you're not allowed to bring a 20 years old car even if it's small, light and as a result doesn't pollute that much (because of its low fuel consumption). However you're allowed to bring in your brand new SUV even if its emissions are much higher. In fact it doesn't matter how much your SUV pollutes, it's recent so it's "fine".
Do you know you usually drive 20+ cars? Poor people. Do you know who loves restrictions on old cars? Car manufacturers.
Perhaps I'm a plumber going to work on a house in a LEZ? Perhaps I need to deliver something? Perhaps deliver to the airport (!) inside the LEZ.
There are all kinds of reasons why someone might need to take a van into an LEZ, if you think for more than about quarter a second.
This is primarily a reason why you shouldn't drive a vehicle from the 1970s, as the article suggests, and why LEZs need practicality not to drive service inflation inside the area.
CO2 is a bit of an outlier in the groups of pollutants emitted by a car. Modern cars will emit way less of the other pollutants that are directly unhealthy for humans to breathe (NOx, CO, particulate matter, etc.).
I know the thread is mostly for fun, but only considering CO2 is a bit misleading when accessing how environmentally (un)friendly a car is.
Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it? My pickup truck wants to know. But it doesn't have to worry, because my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
In fact it looks like the love child my Ford F350 and a Citroen C2. But it can't be because I had the Ford fixed.
If you keep the rear doors open, the cargo platform is 1644 by 1540 (mm), 8x4 would be 2438 by 1219.
Most likely you'd just put sheet goods on the roof (and yes roof racks for panel vans were common, still are).
> my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
You can certainly put yard waste in a C15, though people usually use a trailer for that (unless there's little enough of it it fits in a large builder / garden bag).
Someone pointed out that a lot of US builders will drive pickups truck, and that it's kinda doesn't make sense, why don't they drive a van? Depending on the trade and location builders and contractors here will drive something like a VW Transporter, Mercedes Sprinter, Toyota HiAce or a Peugeot Partner. The Sprinter will fit e.g. your plywood, others will have mounts on the side or roof to transport material.
They won't act as a large wheelbarrow though, not well at least.
When my kids were small, we bought a minivan and it was pretty awesome. I really hadn’t thought much about it until…
A couple of years ago, I rented one to help my kids move into college. It was a Chrysler of some kind and now I’m kind of tempted to buy one. The seats disappear into the floor and then you can carry full sheets of plywood. It’s front wheel drive and drives like a car. Super comfortable, super configurable, good visibility, lots of cup holders, climate controls, power outlets, and reasonably fuel efficient (for what it is). But it’s just sooooo dorky.
The hedonistic treadmill of family cars is so funny to me. First station wagons were the soccer mom car, so everyone got minivans, then minivans were the soccer mom car so everyone got SUVs, and now crossovers. What's next? When do we get to loop around like fashion does?
The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I still see these running in rural Spain and France, usually held together with wire and hope, clocking like what 400k+ km? The XUD diesel engines are practically unkillable. They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode and thankfully none of those DRM locked headlights.
The argument for the countryside need of a modern SUV usually cites reliability and safety, and in 2026, modern complexity is the enemy of reliability. If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench. If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff). Like take the C15 and add 2-4 decades of manufacturing and safety improvements, while keeping it simple and utilitarian.
That would be the absolute dream engineering brief. If I actually sit down and design that vehicle, it would have something like this. List, off the top of my head.
1. You keep the modern metallurgy and the crumple zones. You keep ABS and basic traction control because they are solved problems that save lives without needing cloud connectivity.
2. Instead of a 2000 USD proprietary touchscreen that will be obsolete in 3 years, the dashboard could be just a double DIN slot and a heavy-duty, universal tablet mount with a 100W USB-C PD port. The car provides the power and the speakers and my phone provides the maps and music. When the tech improves, you upgrade your phone, not your dashboard.
3. Nobs and buttons instead of touchscreens like VW has done recently, if my memory serves me right.
The tragedy is that regulations in the EU and North America make this incredibly difficult to sell. The sane environmental stuff you mentioned has morphed into a requirement for deeply integrated electronic oversight. But I genuinely believe there is a massive, silent majority of drivers waiting for a car that promises nothing other than to start every morning and never ask for a software update.
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> I wonder how differently cars would be built, if instead of maximizing for value extraction and crap nobody needs, they instead were optimized for utility and maintenance (and sure, fuel economy, aerodynamics and some sane environmental stuff).
Auto manufacturers already have stripped-down base models of their entry-level vehicles. Many have commercial versions of their vehicles, especially trucks and vans, that are stripped down.
The stripped down base models don't sell well.
Remember how the internet was clamoring for an iPhone Mini? Whenever there were complaints about modern cell phones, you could find what looked like unanimous agreement that a smaller iPhone would be the golden ticket. Then Apple made an iPhone Mini, and it did not sell well.
The same happens with vehicles. Whenever you find threads complaining about modern vehicles it seems unanimous that modern vehicles have too many things consumers don't want and we'd be better off with simple base models. Yet simple base models do exist already and they don't sell well. Real consumers look at their $20,000 Nissan Versa and realize that spending an extra $1-2K on amenities isn't going to change their monthly payment much.
There is a lot of precedent for this. The Tata Nano was an Indian micro car that was small, low-power, and had bare minimum amenities. It was under $5K USD in inflation-adjusted dollars.
It was discontinued due to low demand because sales declined steadily year over year. Nobody wanted it.
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Not easy I would say.
Safety improvement means larger crumple zones, reinforcement, etc... Which mean a bigger and heavier vehicle if you want to keep the same capacity. That in turn means a more powerful engine, brakes, wheels and tyres, etc... further increasing the size and weight of the vehicle. This is an exponential factor.
Fuel economy and environmental stuff (which are linked) come with tighter engine control for better combustion and cleaner exhaust. It means tighter tolerances so simple tools may be less appropriate, and electronics.
And there are comfort elements that are hard to pass nowadays: A/C, power steering, door lock and windows. Mandatory safety equipment like airbags and ABS. Even simple cars like what Dacia makes are still bigger, heavier and more complex than older cars like the C15, they don't really have a choice.
It’s the ford transit connect. Car makers can’t make money on them because a) for personal use they are uncomfortable and b) commercial buyers drive them a million miles before replacing them.
The margin in cars is in the luxury. And for most personal buyers they’ll get as much luxury as they can afford because they are contemplating their monthly cost over total price and leather seats cost $80 more per month on a $600 monthly, they’ll splurge.
Modularity would be great too. Standardized connectors and outer dimensions for engines even between brands. Medium, large, small. You don't need 100 different types. Meanwhile, all this has been overtaken by the need to get away from fossil fuels as soon as we practically can. Oil should not be valued based on the cost of pumping it out of the ground but based on the cost of creating a liter of it from raw materials (CO2, lots of energy).
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Such a thing exists. It's called a Dacia Duster. Well, certainly for utility and to a lesser extent economy.
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Citroen Berlingo is basically that.
Well, it requires a different way of thinking but that's exactly how cars will be built if you'd use them via a subscription (fuel included).
Companies would make less money because consumers just buy a product and keep it for generations if the product quality is THAT good.
When companies make less money, there's less jobs. When there's less jobs people have less money to spend on things like Rent.
You would get the toyota hilux champ which is not purchasable in rich countries.
By now, we would have reached a quality standard of vehicles that are regularly passed down across several generations before they stop being useful.
You can quickly see what a mortal sin this would be against our Lord and Savior, Capitalism.
But whatever you want Toyota has a 10k truck and a jimmy is 15k, if you need a car a vitz can be had for 12k
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Yeah, but how do poor VCs make money then?
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Modern cars break down less than older cars -- they are more reliable, not less. They generate more power, with better emissions. They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
The reliability of a vehicle isn't just the frequency of breakdowns.
It's the frequency of breakdowns times how fucked you are when it does break down.
So the actual math also depends on your means and where you live.
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They’re also vastly safer
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Modern engines are generally more reliable, yes. And galvanised steel and aluminium has helped chassis' and bodies last longer too. I think the 'sweet spot' has passed for most car categories though, the last being city cars when they got mandatory infotainment systems towards the end of the 2010s.
> They have a wealth of creature comforts and features beyond what 1980s cars had.
I don't want these, I don't want to pay for them. They raise the cost and they're unavoidable. This is a NEGATIVE, not a positive.
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Declining service revenue has been a problem for car dealerships for a long time. EVs are only making it even harder as their maintenance needs are reduced further.
This is another topic where people look back on the past with rose colored glasses. At the risk of downvotes, this happens a lot on HN like in threads where people speak about their pre-SSD era computers as being faster and snappier than modern machines. I recently found my old laptop in storage and booted it up. I remember loving how fast it was at the time and being glad I spent extra for the fastest model at the time, but oh boy was it slow relative to anything I use today.
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Both are true. New vehicles are more reliable and safer. New vehicles are vastly harder to maintain by a home auto mechanic.
I don't know enough to say whether realizability requires lower DIYability.
> If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
I could. My wife couldn't.
Also, let's not forget the creature comforts of modern cars... rear seats, airbags, sound insulation, power steering, automatic transmissions, 4wd.
Living in the country, tool-vehicles are very useful. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
>I could. My wife couldn't.
Because she doesn't drive a C15. Believe me, rural french women _will_ fix a C15. There's nothing to break down anyways, the engine is happy to run on distilled corn and melted rubber for oil, the suspension is what suspension, three tires ought to be enough for everyone.
> rear seats,
There's rear benches for you whole family and space for your kids to play around in the back while you're driving, what more do you want ?
>airbags
Useless if you don't crash.
>sound insulation
What do you need to hear except the beautiful sound of the X-Type engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA-Renault_X-Type_engine) ?
>power steering
Grab a phase 3, it has power steering. Or get stronger arms. Or stop trying to steer while you're not moving forward.
> automatic transmissions
You don't need automatic transmissions, you need to learn how to drive stick. The C15 has the added benefit that you don't really have a proper range to change gears, it'll just go in. Actually you don't even need to clutch, just jam the thing.
>4wd
Absolutely useless for 100% of the usages the average american makes of it. If it can drive through mud while carrying cows, it will handle anything you have to throw at it. 4WD sure is a nice thing to make you pay for more gas though.
>Living in the country, it's very useful to own a tool-vehicle. This is typically a beat up old 2wd pickup truck (lower is easier to load) with an 8-ft bed (so you can load full sheets of plywood) and a single cab (so you can get an 8-ft bed). My buddy down the street has one and I borrow it all the time. But you'd never take the family anywhere with this thing. It basically spends its entire life going back and forth to Lowes.
Alright, all kidding aside though: the US is literally the only country in the world that considers pickup trucks as a good utility vehicle: they are the most dogshit type of vehicle you could own for anything, and that includes your sheets of plywood. Pickup trucks are not used by anyone serious anywhere else in the world. Need to carry a bunch of crap ? Buy a busted Renault Master (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Master) and it has the added benefit of you being able to buy your plywood in crazy situations like the tiniest bits of rain.
The US's obsession for pickup trucks is the sign of a deeply unserious society.
The Toyota Hilux makes for a good vehicle to mount weapons in the back, but please see a lawyer about the legality of mounting an M60 at the back of your car if you're not living in Afghanistan
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> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool.
I don't think that's true, the car as mere tool is romantic anachronism. Back then, cars were central identitarian elements to the post-war, western promise of salvation. Whole cities were torn down and rebuild to fit the car. The car had ideological significance. I think, identitarian attachment to the car is actually less today, but due to the historic importance and focus, cars have become unconditional necessities in many places.
I think the reason, you frequently see "old cars as tools" in southern Europe still, is the fact most regions there only started industrialization after 1970 and were/are still greatly underdeveloped/relatively poor, compared to eg. early industrialized nations like Germany, which are super car-centric. They suffered less car adaptation at the time and as a consequence e.g. SUVs would be rather impractical in some places with extremely narrow streets. Additionally, (remaining) farmers in e.g. Germany are almost exclusively rather rich entrepreneurs managing industrialized food production on flat, boring lands, than "poor peasants" caring for traditional farms in remote villages living off tourism somewhere pretty.
Probably less due to zeitgeist/mentality, but rather geography, historic economic abilities and availability.
Can you give an example of a European city that was "torn down and rebuilt to fit the car?"
In my experience, even cities that suffered a lot of war time damage (Hamburg, Dresden) were rebuilt with every street in exactly the same place with the same narrow width.
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My driving skills are probably below average. I really like that my car warns me of zebra crossings and can follow the car in front of me with a safe distance.
Many of the modern car features are just useless marketing fluff, but there is some really good progress too.
I’ve got two cars that I drive regularly, a modern day BMW with all the bells and whistles, and an almost 20 year old Honda Acty Van. It’s 660cc, doesn’t have rear seat belts, or a radio, it does have power windows though.
I enjoy driving both for different purposes, but I have to agree with you. On long distance driving (>200km), the BMW is safer. Cruise control, lane keeping, auto distance. It really makes long, multi hour drives less tiring.
I wouldn’t drive my Acty to the next town.
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> The C15 represents a time when a vehicle was a tool. I feel vehicles want to turn into a subscription service these days.
The same cancer that turned technology from a tool to an ad delivery machine is affecting vehicles.
Because of the growth imperative. With essential things like ICE cars, phones and personal computing, we long satisfied need, those core business products are simply essentially finished/perfected. It's market, and therefore regulatory, failure to have gigantic corporations in positions enabling rent seeking and market shaping, instead of pushing true innovation. If Apple can't come up with something innovative, they need to be forced to downscale instead of creating artificial demand for essentially the same phone 5 years in a row. If VW repeatedly missed the chance to get off their obsolete engine platform, they need to fail.
I think, Cory Doctorow's idea for regaining digital resilience, by "simply" opening up artificial software restrictions through regulation, is widely applicable and would also push for adequate downscaling and actual innovation: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/
A 1984 Ford Ranger with a bed cap would compare favorably to the C15.
I wonder what it would take to convert a modern diesel (e.g. an EA288 TDI) to mechanical injection.
You'd have to fit a mechanical injection pump, which has a different sized pulley, for a start. And injectors and lines adapted to fit.
Pretty much infeasible, I suppose.
This article is comparing a C15 new in 1984 vs a secondhand one today. Really, the C15 represents a time when taxes were ~20% lower and there was a workable steel industry in Europe (which destroyed certain environments, especially around the Ruhrgebiet, whether the exact location was in France, Belgium or Germany). Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one. You can enter with a Berlingo.
There is still a "C15" by the way. It's even less ugly. It's called the Berlingo [1]. Cheapest version is 24000euro + tax, or 35000 + tax for the hybrid version. Let's say in practice it'll run you 30000 euro.
In other words, after tax and counting inflation, let's summarize that since 1984, European cars have about doubled in price. Wages in the EU have gone up about 2x, after inflation.
You have to work 30000/2600 (avg wage per month, euros, in France) = just shy of an entire year of work if you invested 100% of your wage into the car. So let's say 2 years of work.
(due to the EU strongly opposing equal wages across the EU, there is a very large difference between average wage in France and, say, Greece. VERY large, more than 100%)
In 1977, you would have 4900FF average wage in France (in French Francs), and the C15 cost 62000FF. So, just about 12 months at 100% average wage, or let's say 2 years or work, saving up.
So, it even costs about the same.
And, sadly, one is forced to admit that when it comes to European cars, this is a pretty damn good result for that company. Most EU brands have done far worse.
[1] https://www.citroen.fr/vehicules/utility/Berlingo-Van.html
> Oh and one major problem the C15 does have is that despite those stats, it is considered to NOT meet emission standards (due to age), and so you cannot enter many cities in one.
At least in Germany, due to it's age it would classify as a historic vehicle (number plate with an H) and be exempt from emission standards.
> modern complexity is the enemy of reliability
There are years-long threads dozens of pages long on priuschat.com with data files posted by wizards just to figure out the 12v charging pattern.
The vehicle itself will probably stop running before any of these wizards ever figure that out, or even understand the algorithm it uses to occasionally run the engine in EV mode.
And yet, I speculate the total runtime of any year of that vehicle will match what you see for the much simpler Citroen C15-- essentially, bounded only by however long the wizard wants to drive it.
Edit: preemptively-- the Prius driver can drive their Prius on roads appropriate for that type of vehicle for as long as they want. Citroen obviously can go more places-- my upshot is just that the glaring complexity of a Prius doesn't seem to have gotten in the way of its reliability as the author assumes it should have.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field
Do they go there?
I mostly see those in parking lots occupying two spaces (a white one 4, once) or cruising slowly in narrow high streets.
Century of the Self. Products aren't life-improving tools anymore they're a way to express yourself.
It's not just vehicles. It's everything, as it's caused by changes that happened to the highest-level command structures of our economy.
C2V ?
I can't believe we're still waiting for an open source car!
The open source washing machine and printer still aren't here either... :(
I think chances are vastly better now with EVs, you probably could reuse the crowdfunded opensource washing machine. Combustion engines are simply way, way too complex. Although I presume the real showstopper is control electronics and regulatory approval for ICEs and EVs alike.
Many of the things are also there because of regulation.
eg: https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2024/07/01/mandated-a...
You have cameras, sensors, gps, maps, that need to be updated... and all that would easily be solved by a few policemen with radar guns and writing fines.
What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect at all costs from scratches even.
You don't HAVE to. In a no fault case you can just take the insurance payout and live with the damage.
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect
Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.
They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
>They have no ECU to brick, no adblue sensors to fail and put the car into limp mode
Which means they are some of the most polluting and wasteful cars available. ECUs are good. They make cars safer, more reliable and more efficient. Car manufacturers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to add adblue, because the Diesel engines are pretty toxic otherwise.
The apologia for old cars is just insane, they are not what you think they are.
>If your C15 breaks down in a field, you can fix it with a wrench.
This is just delusional.
> If your Range Rover breaks down in a field because a sensor in the air suspension noticed a voltage variance...you are stranded until a tow truck takes it to a dealer.
No, you just reset the ECU and get on with your day.
With all due respect, you are confusing a software race condition with a hard fault in a safety critical system.
Resetting the ECU only works if the error is a transient glitch in the code logic. If the failure is a physical sensor reading out of range?
Furthermore, modern automotive architectures store permanent diagnostic trouble codes in non volatile memory specifically to prevent people from "just resetting it" to bypass emissions or safety checks. You cannot clear those with a battery pull. You would need a proprietary manufacturer tool to force a relearn or adaptation.
But more importantly, your argument accepts a terrifying premise. That a 2.5 ton kinetic object moving at highway speeds should have the reliability profile of a consumer router. If I have to treat my vehicle like a frozen windows 98 desktop to get home, the automotive engineering has failed me. Physics doesn't need a reboot.
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This. I think the entire argument and comparison is a fallacy because you can't just compare vehicles on utilitarian factors when many (most?) people are buying primarily based on fashion/aesthetics. Through my American eyes that C15 is dog shit ugly and I don't even care to read through how it measures up on utility because it's style is already a dealbreaker.
Personally-I know I don't need a big truck, and don't have farm/ranch/heavy duty requirements, but SUVs are quite useful for normal city life in most of the US. Several times a month I am fully loaded for some reason or another. May as well be fashionable and handle well too since this is also the vehicle I commute in and valet at a fancy restaurant occasionally.
I noticed that people often treat cars as they treat clothes. It's their largest and most expensive costumes.
This means that fashion and looks start to play a major role, utility be damned. This also means that relatively minor details, like the exact shape of headlights, become a major stylistic and thus market niche differentiator.
I don't think it's a new problem with cars. But it maybe relatively new in the utility / light truck space.
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I can confirm all of the findings.
My first car I got in Germany was a C15. I used it to transport server racks, but also had a mattress in the back and had my first sex on it. On muddy festivals where others cars got stuck, I was able to get out easily. Repairs were dirt cheap. It also had a tow bar, and was able to pull a 1.5 metric ton trailer to get equipment to a computer party.
And I still was able to do 160 km/h (100 MPH) with it on the Autobahn. With or without server racks, with or without sex.
Best car I ever had.
It is really insane that these days cars on average weigh 25-40 times of their load. Human stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
My first car was a rusty 20 year old Renault 5, in which I barely fit myself, so no sex in the car for me.
(But my grandma had a flat that she did not live in during the summer months... hmm... sweet memories... excuse me, what were we talking about again?)
At first I wanted to write a comment about how cars and sex are apparently very well linked. Upon thinking it over once more, it appears that the real link to sex is privacy, which is of course obvious. Thinking over it once more, we're brought back to the real selling point of cars: total privacy. Public transport is on paper really good, but it is totally devoid of privacy - which means that it is bad in reality. In other more provocative words, public transportation is bad because you can't have sex on the bus
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> what were we talking about again?
I think, you were just about to tell us about your first time with your grandma.
Reminds me of the 1973 Toyota RV-2 concept car, with the back of the car being a giant sexy shag carpet. Look at this amazing (nude) ad in Penthouse:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180408023557/https://members.i...
>Best car I ever had.
You were doing 160 in a death trap with minimal safety features, which was literally making the air unbreathable.
Citroën were the first to make diesel filters standard. And my C15 had the HDi engine with diesel filters. And unlike others, they did not cheat and were not part of the Diesel scandal.
Also, I survived.
And when it comes to security features, more important than not having side airbags would have been not to combine smoking weed and fellatio while doing 160.
I am not saying that any of this would be a good idea if keeping your life is a priority.
But even with maniacs like myself on the road, Germany has deaths from fatal car crashes of 3-4 per 100,000, while the US has 12-13.
But again, I am not a lawyer, not a doctor, and this is not health advise, just a true story of what I did 25 years ago that may or may not entertain readers.
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> The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US. A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing.
The craziest thing about this criticism is that it is phrased as hyperbole but the reality is that this is seen as a small truck in the US.
The Ford Ranger actually is the best selling pickup truck in Europe for 10 straight years, but doesn’t sell as much in the US. The larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more in the US.
The best part about the F-150 is that it isn't even toddlers at that point. The most common F-150 variant I see in my area's hood goes up to my shoulder and I'm 2 meters tall.
You often see the very important people driving these working their way through crowded parking lots and places that are primarily foot traffic with a "Wtach out for ME!" driving style.
It's so funny that when people design vehicles that actually have a need to be big - big buses, commercial vans, fire trucks - one of their common features is that visibility is treated as something important, and often these types of vehicles have either a nearly flat, uniform front side, or they try to minimize the engine compartment hump as much as possible and make the windshield huge. But when we talk about cars that are made for the consumer, all sanity goes out the window, we get these near-caricatures that would be hilarious if they weren't real. The craziness can only be somewhat tamed by government restrictions, depending on where you live, but the peak of this design results in huge, elevated flat boxes for engine compartments, mounted as high as possible. It doesn't matter that the driver has a blind spot in every direction, what matters is showing off how HUGE your 18L V32 engine must surely be under that hood, how powerful it must be to draw air through that chrome grille that's half a person's height, and most importantly, how much of an imposing heroic warrior one must be to own that tank.
Yep, the hoods are higher than my wife's head.
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I'm probably one of the few people in this thread who are actually truck shopping right now
The ranger is a great option for most people but one of my capabilities for the truck is to bring my bike to motorcycle track days. Usually I'd only take a single motorcycle, however track days are more fun with friends. to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.[0]
that leaves only the bigger 1500 class trucks as options for me, and why I'm going with an F150
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmegARwXN7Q
> to fit two motorcycles in the back of the Ranger, you need to adjust the angle of the handlebars awkwardly to fit both on the bed.
can't you position one bike facing forward and one facing back, so the handlebars don't collide? Either way, going with an absurdly big and dangerous car to avoid _awkwardly positioning_ some cargo is pretty American thing to do
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Trailers do exist and there is no good reason to drive a commercial vehicle every day for simple trips. It is also less expensive to use a trailer.
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So, the normal size truck actually carries the things you want to transport, if you move their handlebars.
You’d pay an extra $7000 because… you don’t like to pack?
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Don't know why you are down voted. People just assume that you have a place to store a trailer (and truck and motorcycle).
As to your choice of the Ford,as a rural late model (2018) F-150 owner, I'd encourage you to consider something else. A used Tundra V8 or one of the GMC/Chevy's. My mechanic is thumbs down on the Rams longer term.
I've had nothing but stupidity with this F-150 and all I do is personal plowing and a few loads of gravel or dirt each year. Granted, my steep dirt road can be very rough in mud season. But I've now spent about 8K in non-maintenance repairs.
I say this as a past owner of multiple mustangs and rangers - I'm done with Ford.
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A lot of commenters saying you "need" a trailer (instead of an F150), but another option would be one bike in the bed and the second bike (if needed) on a hitch-mounted rack. A hitch rack takes less space to store when you're not using it than a full trailer. It would probably be more annoying to load and unload than just putting two bikes in the bed.
Anyway, if you want an F150, get it -- I don't really care.
Get a trailer. Way more flexibility that way and easier loading/unloading.
I prefer small trailers for this but if you don't have the space for a trailer, F150 it is.
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This is dumb, I've lost count of how many times I've hauled multiple motorcycles somewhere and you know how I do it? A trailer. It's easier and safer to load and unload, which is why almost everyone else does that as well.
If you want an 'image' purchase just own up to it. Your post hoc justifications don't really hold water.
> The Ford Ranger actually sells better in Europe than it does in the US. And the larger F series trucks sell more than an order of magnitude more.
Do you have any sources for this? I looked online and found a couple of charts, none of them support this claim. The Ford Ranger sales in Europe vs US are similar (who buys more varies by year) but the F series seems to be mostly bought in US
I think they meant it has much larger % share of pickup market in Europe vs US, not necessarily higher absolute number of sales (https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/feu/en/news/2025/02...)
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Where in Europe is that? Because in southern Europe pickups are very rare, but maybe they're more common in the north.
I have a Ford F-150 (14 gen) and the front is so huge I need to step on the front grill guard to reach anything inside the engine compartment. It is all around an unreasonably sized vehicle. My excuse is that (a) I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around and (b) I work from home so no commute. But for most people who do not work construction this is an insane daily driver.
> I do use it for home improvement stuff and for hauling stuff around
I don’t understand this argument, as they seem incredibly impractical for that. There is very little space for ‘stuff’, there is only the uncovered bed which is relatively small. The bed is also at an awkward height so very impractical to get stuff in or out. Since the bed is open, you always have to take all your ‘stuff’ out, you can’t leave tools in there or anything of value or it will get stolen. If you put a hard cover on. it leaves even less space. And since a large part of the vehicle has no roof you cannot have a roof rack.
You do not see these used by people in construction or other trades here in Europe. They use vans. An (extended) van has an ungodly amount of lockable storage space, easily accessible with side and back doors, with a floor at a reasonable height and if that isn’t enough you with a roof rack you can strap a lot to the roof as well.
I really don’t see how something like an F-150 is more practical for ‘hauling stuff’ than something like a Mercedes Sprinter.
I did look up some numbers (used the most capable configuration I could find for each of the vehicles):
Max bed length for an F-150: 247cm Max cargo space length for a Sprinter: 481cm
Bed/cargo width: F-150: 126cm, Sprinter 178cm Bed/cargo height: F-150: 54cm, Sprinter: 200cm
Max. payload capacity: F-150 : 1106kg, Sprinter 1477kg for the extra-long version, 2447kg for the long version.
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My wife walked past an F350 the other day with our toddler, and the hood was above her head.
My wife, that is. She’s 5’10”.
I think the F-150 is the most popular. I know many people don’t care about other’s subjective experiences, but it’s always such a mindfuck to my EU mind when I see trucks of this size.
Like my brain expects the car to finish, but there’s more car. Then it happens again and again in a quick succession. It confuses me, I shake it off. I look at the car again. The bed is empty, there’s one person in it.
Then I think „what’s the point”? And then I remember we grew up in different environments and have different expectations about how things should look like. And I still don’t fully get it.
Almost any large car will fit almost anywhere in the US, so you might as well get the car that serves even your most marginal use cases. Fuel costs are much lower than Europe, and Americans are relatively richer anyway.
From my experience, these trucks make much more sense on a road in the US. European roads are fairly small so these trucks look _even bigger_, whereas in the US everything is massive so the cars fit. Still, having to look _up_ to see the windshield is crazy and I hope it won't be normalized in the EU
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The f-150 is a bit smaller than its big brothers the f-250 and f-350 dually!
The even smaller Ford Maverick sells twice as many as the Ranger
When I see a Ford car in Geoguessr I always know I'm in USA. Just Americans but these terrible cars.
How casually people here are ignoring NOx and especially PM2.5. It has no DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter). You are emitting more than 200 times the amount of pm2.5 than a modern diesel. source:https://www.nanoparticles.ch/archive/2011_May_PR.pdf https://aaqr.org/articles/aaqr-20-02-oa-0081
Also this car has only has 60hp.
Mine had the HDi engine with DPF and 70hp.
Citroën were the first to make DPF standard.
Also, I would like to kindly remind you of the concept of "time". This was 25 year ago. The alternatives would have been worse. These days a C15 would be electric.
Obviously the OP is tounge-in-cheek, so keep it lightly.
But it does have merit: If you wish to measure your environmental footprint, you must look at the total lifetime of car, most importantly the manufacturing part. There is a difference between 900 KG of parts for a C15 vs 1,900 - 2400 KG for a Ford Ranger. These days most PM come from braking. Stopping 2000 KG will obviously cause more emissions from the brakes than stopping 1000 KG.
All in all, the point really is: The ratio between weight/size of the car itself and what is inside (people and/or server racks) has gotten completely out of hand. No, you do not need a 2,000 KG tank to move your 50-100 KG of flesh around. It's insanity, no matter if your care about the planet or not.
It's also unsafe. He's comparing it to a modern Ranger, not the Ranger of the same year as the C15 (which was much smaller and got better fuel economy), and he completely ignores the fact that the Citroen wasn't sold in North America.
He seems to imply there would be no appetite for one here but I disagree. In western Canada I see imported Kei trucks everywhere and these fill a similar niche!
Safety is relative.
Ranger crashes into C15: Ranger wins, C15 passengers dead. Ranger crashes into human: Ranger wins, human dead.
C15 crashes into C15: Tossup. C15 crashes into human: C15 wins, but human is less dead.
The whole concept of car upsizing all the time is about that: If you crash into another moving object, you want to be the winner.
Understood. Buy a tank.
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> Also this car has only has 60hp.
And it weighs less than half of the other two (less than a ton), so less power is needed.
I agree though, the C15 is slower than the other two, but less than you’d perhaps think.
I own a Citroën 2CV. It has some of the same qualities: super robust, incredibly off-roady, simple mechanically, but I take my “regular car” (2017) for road trips > 100km…
I’ve done numerous long road trips in the 2CV though, before I got the other car. Some longer than 1000km.
I agree with the TFA, that many overestimate their needs, but older cars are also less luxurious - obviously!
The post is a hot take, slightly tongue-in-cheek, isn’t it? :)
That’s fair if you only account for usage emission. The compared tanks weight 2/3x as much (more ressources to extract, manufacture, transport…) and are made of intricate polymers, composites, wires & electronics… event the metal alloys are very technical (saving them to weight even more) and can’t be recycled into newer car. Old cars are mainly… steel.
I know it's a joke, but if you clip a curb or even a slightly chunky branch at 15mph in one of these EVERYONE DIES (...only partially joking)
In a crash it'll fold up like the tin can it is, even against a car of a similar vintage and size (no comment on the cows). Up against even a modern supermini and you're literal mince meat, let alone a modern SUV. At least you won't suffer long.
So if you are off roading or on a snowy road, hopefully you won't slip into a tree or roll over. Modern cars - even "small" ones -are heavier partly because they are substantially safer. A crash that would have had to have you cut out of the wreckage by the fire brigade (potentially losing a limb or two in the process) is now the sort of thing you can walk away from. Yes even in "small" modern cars (you do not need a SUV for safety).
It's night and day really - just go look at the archive on EuroNCAP.. In the crash tests that left 90s and early 2000s cars as unrecognisable mounds of broken and twisted metal (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9a8PTeFDaYU which was a car that was probably 10 years more advanced than the c15 in terms of safety...) now barely even break the windscreen of modern super-mini cars (e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NaWVepTJTGw&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB). Amazing.
I used to drive through France in the C15 days and you'd see a lot of crashes compared to England, a lot because of the road layouts. Straight in France so people went fast through villages and the like. In England everything's twisty.
The Citroen Saxo was notably terrible. It was remarked upon even at the time, especially due to the target market of its sportier versions: foolish young men. Here's another hatchback from 2000, faring noticeably better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXNgKwWFs - not to say for a moment that you wouldn't still want a 2025 car.
The French seem to be very thoughtful people who solved multiple pesky problems permanently:
1) Guillotine for the super rich
2) Nuclear to power >70%
3) C15 for people, cows, craftsmen, mini house
4) TGV
5) french fries for the fastest carbohydrate delivery, handily beating rice
I wish they bring back the first 3 and do some shorts, market them to the world. Fries are doing fine.
I'm a big fan of the current range of French Renault electric cars.
The 5, 4, Megan and Scenic are just excellent.
I think the Scenic is probably the one I'd buy right now based on the range, 380 miles but the 5 and the 4 have so much character they're probably the first really iconic electric car designs IMHO.
This! Especially 5!
Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism. Those who don't are not well seen in society, or left the country already.
So the best thing I'd see them excelling at in this century, if they can drive their ideology in the right direction, would be producing low-tech solutions solving 90% of problems with 20% of the costs, with open-source like tools / materials / methods everyone can replicate easily. A bit like this article about this old car.
> Right now french people are obsessed with ecology and egalitarianism.
Do you have anything to read up on that? This got me a little excited, but I also doubt it due to the rise of right wing populism everywhere else. Man, if France actually got the rare attitude to get shit done in these times, I may move there and help.
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French fries is not a french invention AFAIK but belgian!
That’s not true.
https://www.rtbf.be/article/cuisine-la-frite-vient-elle-de-f...
https://www.news.uliege.be/cms/c_10630394/fr/les-grands-myth...
Also the French have the great Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, early and famous potato proponent. Do they even want credit for such a basic dish?
There is considerable argument over it.
Yup, French fries are Belgian. Also - it's important to cook them twice, otherwise it's just McDonalds and not real French fries.
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> Guillotine for the super rich
Can we not glorify mass executions on HN please? Bluesky is available if that's your thing.
The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.
The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.
It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.
When did hacker news become so right wing that saying the French revolution was a good societal movement is seen as "glorifying mass executions"? lmao
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No. 5) is Belgian.
I believe both nation would be offended about the confusion of origins.
Americans simply thought they are in France in WWII when they ate it.
; )
Here are some Belgian articles about the French origin :
https://www.rtbf.be/article/cuisine-la-frite-vient-elle-de-f...
https://www.news.uliege.be/cms/c_10630394/fr/les-grands-myth...
> Guillotine for the super rich
You know modern France has the exact same problem of billionaire lobbying and media consolidation that the US has right?
Arnault (LVMH) [0], Trappier (Dassault) [1], Niel (Illiad) [2], Lagardère (Lagardère SA) [3], Bolloré (Bolloré Group) [4] and a couple others have an inordinate amount of control over French politics. It's also why whenever a country like China, the US, India, or others wants to hold the EU by the balls, they end up tariffing Congac, because Arnault's LVMH has a near monopoly on Congac production in France, so he almost always pressures Macron into acquiesing because otherwise he would threaten to back the RN.
Both France and the US are similarly ranked flawed democracies [5] with similar dysfunctions.
Also, immediately following the revolution, the guillotiners ended up doing it for the rich [6], as the French Revolution ended up leading to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule with le Directoire, Napoleon, Napoleon III, and others. The only thing you learn from the French Revolution is the same thing you learn from Tahrir Square - the house always wins, which in political science is modeled via Selectorate Theory [7] and Veto Players [8].
Sadly, it's the same reason why despite mass protest after mass protest, the Iranian regime hasn't fallen - the primary political and economic veto players in Iran (Army, IRGC, Basij, Police, Clergy, Business leadership, SoE leadership, Bonyad leadership) haven't defected because they have more to lose than gain if a revolution succeeded. The moment a handful of these interests think they can expand their presence under a new regime is when you would see Khamenei fall, but the leadership would end up being the same ba***rds anyhow, just like how the Islamic Republic ended up co-opting and rehabilitating army officers and business leadership from the Shah's regime during the Iran-Iraq War and after the cultural revolution.
[0] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/08/07/how-be...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/frances-d...
[2] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2022/07/10/u...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/article/world/macron-and-the-moguls-...
[4] - https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-et-idees/dossier/la...
[5] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
[6] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/650023
[7] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4092374
[8] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rvv7
The guillotine wasn't for the super rich, but for the privileged by birth. The equivalent would be to guillotine the nepo babies (and the Ivy League administrators who rubber stamp their admission).
Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell.
Most guillotined were commoners [0] - not the wealthy nor the intelligentsia.
> Or fix inheritance. And by fix I mean tax as hell
If France can't fix it [1] after politically powerful billionaires stymied it [2], neither can the US
[0] - https://theconversation.com/the-french-revolution-executed-r...
[1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/10/31/french-l...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-richest-man-lvmhs-arna...
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I had a Renault Kangoo and was similarly militant about its supremacy. It was a cheap, reliable thing and people carrier. It could fit five people, or two people, two bicycles and plenty of camping gear. It was cheap and ugly enough to shrug about cosmetic damage, so I never worried about kicking the doors shut or sitting on the roof. It was also tiny and easy to drive and park. It was mechanically simple and reliable.
It broke down recently at 18 years of age and I can't justify maintaining a car in Berlin, but I loved that car to bits.
Genuine question: what about the NOx?
I remember in Belgium when the laws pushed for lower CO2, and you got an influx of all these diesel engines, as you couldn't get that low with gasoline engines (that had some power).
But a few years later people came to the realization that CO2 is the least bad of the global warming gasses, and those diesel engines emitted a lot of NOx.
Every year there was a distance that you'd have to drive before diesel made sense (as you get more miles out of a gallon, and it was cheaper per gallon).
That number kept on creeping up due to new diesel taxes, and the fact that diesel is no longer cheaper per unit than gas.
Don't forget pm2.5 ! Especially since this doesn't have an DPF(diesel particulate filter).
Most people who live in rural Britain today are still getting around in hatchbacks or estates (station wagons, to use the American term). The enormous SUVs are almost entirely driven by people who've used their money to buy into the countryside aesthetic.
That’s why those big SUV are nicknamed “Chelsea tractors”
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He's mixing US/UK vs France and 1985 vs 2025.
Today, Citroen's equivalent offering is the Berlingo. Starts at 26k, not as much of a tank as the other cars but still way more massive than the C15.
No. He's not comparing US vs France, you read that into it. He's comparing a car from 1985 (which happens to be French) to a car from 2025 (which happens to be made in the US).
You're attributing the difference to different countries, but everyone else here sees it's mostly it's from a different era.
There's the Citroen Nemo. It's a more compact version and I believe closer in size to the older panel vans. The new Berlingos are wider and taller than they used to be.
Today's C15 is called... the Dacia... Dokker?
Dacia takes "obsolete" Renault technologies and sells them for dirt cheap.
Good news everyone, the Dacia Sandero might have been a laugh 20 years ago, but today Dacia are doing really well.
The berlingo, especially up to 2014, are tankier, ther're known with the name B9 (vin starts with that) diesel 1.6 hdi has proven resilience)
The C15 was produced up until 2006.
Good luck fitting a full palette in a berlingo though
https://images.caradisiac.com/images/0/9/8/4/190984/S0-route...
I saw Renault 4 used in similar ways in France. Hatchback fully up, oyster farmers using it like a van.
My favorite C15 story is with my childhood friend who got it as a hand-me-down first car, we used to put plastic lawn chairs in the back and head to the beach...
The gas meter was broken, so my friend had to guesstimate when he needed a refill.
At one point it was stolen, but then found a week later on the side of the highway,out of gas..
missed a chance to use "gastimate"
First off, I agree with the point made, though I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru. The people I know who have to deal with excessive snow or mud on country roads commonly opt for that. Of course there’s the “men” who compensate for their lack of buldge with 350s, dualies, etc. If you don’t work a farm, those whips are dummm.
That was a good perspective though- I grew up hearing Citroen makes garbage.
Side note- The vast majority of pollution is from industry. By a lot. That is where the finger needs to be pointing. Pointing the finger at SUV drivers distracts from the real issue and keeps us blaming each other.
> I think a more reasonable comparison would be something like a subaru
Yeah, I get this is tongue-in-cheek but if you're going to try to convince Americans of this idea, you need to use units we understand, and a car we've heard of.
Maybe that's why Subarus are stereotyped as a lesbian car in the US. Instead of grandstanding, they "get the job done" (as the Chappell Roan song goes).
Unless you’re in the Pacific Northwest, in which case, they are issued to every new resident (myself included). Traded in my Ford Explorer for a Subaru Outback and could not be happier.
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>prove that men who buy SUVs and Pick-Ups are, with very few exceptions, compensating for something ;)
What does that mean? The thread just repeating this compensating thing but not sure what does it try to say really.
Also most women I know drive SUVs or family vans not compact cars. Are they compensating for something?
I don't know if it is some much 'compensating' as it is a "look at my toy" showing off type of thing which isn't really directed at women. When I drive around metro areas it is pretty clear that the large majority of trucks are "house" trucks - they are never used for truck things. They are washed, waxed with nice shiny black tires.
Don't get me wrong - if you got the dough, by all means drive what you want. But most truck owners could get by with something else just as well.
I think he writes 'compensate' (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/compensate, meaning no. 3) as a translation of 'compenser' (https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/compenser). There's a not-so-funny cliché: men with a small you-know-what supposedly tend to choose larger cars to make up for the difference in size.
> Also most women I know drive SUVs or family vans not compact cars. Are they compensating for something?
Freud: Duh?!
Brits are no strangers to the Citroen C15 as the article seems to imply. We liked them.
It was the basis of a successful line of British built micro-campers from Romahome.
https://www.practicalmotorhome.com/advice/used-romahome-on-c...
I remember looking at one as a surf-van back in the day.
In Italy we had similar memes for the (old) Fiat Panda 4x4
the Amazon's Grand Tour episode which compared the Jeep Wrangler, a Chevrolet Silverado, and Panda 4x4 as jungle cars was highly satisfying.
Best car on snow ever. Like next one does not come even close.
Top gear driving to the magnetic north pole in Hiluxes was impressive. I figure those would compete. They were a bit non standard. (vid https://youtu.be/q0hoPNmY4oU)
Indeed, light and 4x4 is the best combo. I think the Citroen 2CV was pretty impressive as well and they did have that dual engine version (though it was never sold to the public).
There's practically a whole meme genre for the first-gen Renault Twingo.
A 1980s Toyota Hilux would give it a run for its money
https://youtu.be/Yl1FNX08HFc
It doesn’t look like it would fit three cows.
Toyota Hilux are in their own category. They are literally combat proven.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/93/42/42/93424282cbcafce0ad81...
Designed in the era of Use-maxing vs Status-maxing. I think modern cars are taking a lot of car experience out and putting in the phone experience in. My Maruti Suzuki 800 was such a fun car to drive. Easy to repair. Decently efficient. Repair manual was understandable.
The new electrics are great. But they are less of a car and more of a transportation technology.
It’s incredibly grating to get into my mom’s car and see a FYP on her dashboard with podcast recs. It makes me feel like I woke up on the moon. It just makes no sense and it’s clearly harder (for her, and in general) to use than an old-school car radio.
It doesn’t help (but still besides the point) that they typically give the impression of being a stripped back Moto G4 a couple years out of updates.
fourgonnette! Thanks to this post now i know where the spanish version of the word comes from! Furgoneta!
That's hilarious. The German version (VW Caddy) is similar. Citroen at some point had a van version of the 2CV and the Diane, this is the continuation of that tradition.
Literally: the C15 was based on the Visa (clearly, when you look at it!), and was the first platform-shared vehicle between Citroen and Peugeot where it was basically a Peugeot warmed over with some additional eccentricity. Not bad, overall though.
Exactly. And the Visa was an interesting little car all by itself.
Sorry for going counter to the narrative, but I had a friend who had an early 2000s Citroen which was made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation - and I tell you, by the stories he told, they deserved it.
There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times.
He contemplated setting it on fire rather than selling it, not wanting the next lucky owner to go through the same stuff he did.
> made around the time when French cars had the worst reputation
A reputation well earned IMO…
> There was no part on this which didn't get replaced during the scant few years he owned it, and it left him stranded like half a dozen times
French cars have a philosophy of more maintenance than German cars. On the other hand, Frenchy spare parts are often cheaper and easier to replace.
E.g. a timing belt replacement on PSA HDI takes just a few hours and costs €2-300. On a VAG TDI, the same procedure is almost a full day at a (competent) workshop and costs ~5-10x as much.
Horses for courses I think.
My daily driver is a 10yo VAG, for the record.
It's a global pandemic of oversized cars. People love SUVs because it makes them feel powerful and successful. Explanations why they need them are generally along the lines of "because we have kids" (but SUVs don't actually have that much space), or "because heavier means safer" (well yes, at the cost of others).
I love small cars, in fact I owned a Fiat 500 for a number of years and a number of small VWs. With that said, it really grinds my gears (Pun intended) when Europeans want to lecture Americans about large cars.
Our roads are bigger, gas is dirt cheap, parking is plentiful and spacious outside dense metros, and the RAM 1500 I own is 100x more useful no mater how you want to try and spin the facts. I can tow a large trailer with my Jeep on it, a large RV, boats, etc. It is highly capable off roading on technical terrain here in Utah. It’s also insanely comfortable and luxurious on road trips and has enough room to lay on the rear bench seat as if it were a bed. I truly use all of the capabilities in a niche that almost no other vehicle besides a standard size truck occupies.
This thread is so sad. A population in decline.
You know all those dark patterns in software? What if we applied the same concepts to gigantic mechanical devices, taking advantage of human psychological faults, and generate a profit margin on those? Sure seems what seems to have happened with motor vehicles
The ranger has a tow rating of 7500 lb.
The gross vehicle weight (ie the max vehicle weight with the heifers, obviously stuffies) of the C15 is 1500 kg (hence the name) or 3300 lb.
Uhaul rents a car tow trailer rated for 5000 lb that weighs 2200 lb [1].
The Ranger, then, can tow the C-15 + the heifers = 5500 lb and have 2000 lb left over to put two real heifers, and do this legally at 70mph.
Citroen makes great vehicles though. Amazing off roaders.
[1] https://www.uhaul.com/Trailers/Auto-Transport-Rental/AT/
Absolutely true. It's even the subject of many memes! search for "c15 memes".
I love the Chad: "I love you!" c15: (oil and engine lights on) "Please let me die"
These made my day and I barely understand Spanish
In Poland it was Polonez Caro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez
> But what if you're an environmentally conscious mother who needs to drive the 5 minute walk to your kids' school? Surely, a modern car must be less polluting?
> CO2 emissions/km:
No, you have already compared fuel consumption. This is equivalent.
My family hired https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izh_2715 in eastern Europe to move furniture few times. It was usually referred as "Pirojok", which can be translated as stuffed bun.
My dad got rid of his C15 after driving 1 million kilometers with it (rural France) The engine was fine surprisingly, the body was rusted to the bone though
That's fairly typical. I had a diesel from that era and it ended up in a boat when it already had 750K on it... it is still going as far as I know.
Can't imagine producing and selling this under the current regulations (and not just the crash-worthiness). I with they and C15 move towards each other...
To be fair to the SUV they weren't really a thing in France before 2 decades after the C15. To be fair to the C15 the main buyers of SUV at the beginning were urban and suburban moms that wanted to show they had money and we're feeling better in big and tall cars
I’ve been a passenger in the front and the back of a C15 and they are pure utility vehicule. You get heating in winter and ventilation in summer. The windows are manual, front seat are okay, and I don’t know if they have updated models with aircon before stopping the production.
My government did everything to not allow people use old cars. Great monuments like Citroen C15 are not allowed in the whole city of Krakow.
The Ranger is now a midsize truck. A better comparison is the hybrid Maverick.
Unrelated to the article: What I find frustrating about mastodon is how I click a link and then cannot favorite a post as there's no unified login between federated servers.
Asking seriously, what is holding us from creating these masterpieces again?
I have the Ford Ranger with the 2 litre biturbo diesel engine in Australia. It is so good it's hard to conceive that a better vehicle could be possible.
If that's the one with the wet timing belt, then I can think of one way to make it better!
It's funny (and depressing) because it's actually true despite the hyperbole.
Best car ever! I have seen then running in Spain forever and still work as the first day. Easiest car to repair ever and never breaks!
Easiest car to repair ever and never breaks!
If it never breaks how do people know it's easy to repair?
Well, it never breaks as in: it will always get you to where you need to go because the engine just keeps running. Broken driveshaft? Stick a vice grip on it and keep rolling... And they're easy to repair because there isn't a lot in them to begin with, so you have a lot of room to work. Running gear wears and needs fixing but the core is nigh on indestructible. Same with the VW diesels from that era, the 1.9 mechanical.
This is basically the equivalent to the FIAT Panda 4x4 in small villages in Italy
Lovely. Of only they could make some in todays's world of new cars....
> I often hear Americans & rich brits justify buying oversized, polluting vehicles by claiming they need them because they live in the "countryside".
> I call bullshit, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
But they aren’t even for sale in the US!
Typical technically correct content.
If you are person that doesn’t give a fuck about keeping up with Jones’s you just buy whatever does the job.
I could drive much better car but I don’t have to impress my neighbors.
Still with non-impressive car I get pushed around on the road by guys in big and impressive cars. But also I drive on defense anyway so I get them to go far away from me by letting them pass.
I am quite fit though not super big or anything and car I drive is attributable to old geezers or ladies. Once guy jumped out of the car to shout at me he took his tone two notches down quickly.
So technically you might be right but still there is whole human experience to deal with.
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but not in the same way as what I was thinking. It's not about impressiveness - as in, a show of wealth or status. It's all about size. This is a relatively small car, but as far as I can tell, back in the day all of them were considerably smaller, even the ones that were pricey and designed to look cool or expensive. Nowadays, the most obnoxious and dangerous car drivers have united with the most hands-off governments and manufacturers willing to pander to them exclusively to create an arms race of building the biggest megatank that can fit within a lane and only occupy six parking spots at once.
what's a modern equivalent? (and maybe a 4 seater)
I'm sold. Where can I buy one!
Off topic: That comma in the title really grates on me. It's supposed to be "dramatic pause" or something, but it can also be read as "pause while I check my notes to remember what the name of this thing actually is".
Hat tip to Joel Garreau, from whom I stole this reading of that kind of comma.
It is wrong - it should be a colon “:” instead of a comma.
This is pretty tiresome, however the article is mostly correct. If I could get one of these and own it and drive it in the US, I would. I certainly don't want an over-expensive, over-weight, over-featured monstrosity, but that's all anyone sells in the US.
The Peugeot XUD engine that powers the Citroën C15 (and a whole bunch of other European cars of similar vintage) is what most of the small Ford diesels were based on, right until they got into the "wet belt" nonsense.
I have "repaired" one that was used to power a small fishing boat (it came out of a Xantia, and the hydraulic pump was used to operate the shooting gear). The boat sank and the engine compartment was flooded with sea water for about a week. It started up and ran quite happily after draining what was approximately a 50/50 mix of sea water and sludgy engine oil and putting fresh in, then removing the injectors and cranking it to blow the water out of the cylinders.
It never quite ran right after that and was hard to start, and five or six years later the boat's owner replaced it with another Xantia engine, this time the turbocharged version.
> CAPACITY: C15: 2.6m³ Ranger: 1.8m³ Discovery: 0.8m³
I mean this is excluding beds. C15 doesn't have one.
I always had BMWs, like I only ever bought reasonably high-end BMWs, but when we bought our place in Ireland, I needed a vehicle on Swiss plates and insurance (for legal reasons) to use there when car rental in Ireland was running crazy money. I had a look on the Swiss classifieds sites for anything "rechtslenker" (right-hand drive) and found two Rolls Royces, a clapped out MG, and about 15 yellow ex-Swiss Post Renault Kangoo 2-seat car-based cargo vans. (I guess they wanted their mailmen to be able to step out onto the curb, hence RHD in a LHD country?) I bought the van. Weird config: right hand drive, but configured for right-hand traffic, meaning I had to replace the headlights and fog light and get it re-aligned to fit in. Automatic transmission, 1.6L petrol engine, no airbag, no wheel lock, no AC, knobs and switches, glass all around like the MPV version, but a cargo floor. It's insanely simple, the parts are practically free from the perspective of a BMW fanatic, and it's actually a hoot to drive. When we moved, I imported it with our stuff, and it's our only car now. Hauls firewood like you wouldn't believe, and tows a large 2.5m x 1.25m x 1.2m single-axle box trailer without complaints, meaning I can (and have done) shift all the sheets of plywood and drywall I need without buying a pickup. We live way out in the countryside, where the roads have grass up the middle and potholes down both sides, but the Kangoo's ground clearance is enough (especially when empty) that it's never been an issue. I hardly miss the BMW. A little French van is all you need.
My parents had 3 kids and a 2CV as our single family car for a while. We managed just fine, something that is supposedly "impossible" these days.
I get the same feelings when i see a suv driven by a single person, and i think of the good old fiat panda…
Modern cars have crumple zones.
That's the entire difference.
This person is a living caricature. If Ford wanted to sell more F350s, their best advertisers could do no better than this (man's?) mastodon.
Similar to Nissan / Datsun 620, 720, and D21 trucks in the US. They ran forever, especially for folks who were mechanics and kept a stash of parts.
This song is not about C15, but is quite appropriate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzDg-1lEaD8
Notice that one of the pictures isn't actually a C15, but a Renault Express, which is equally indestructible though slightly smaller inside.
"This Mastodon server is a friendly and respectful discussion space for people working in areas related to EU policy."
"The Ford Ranger (2020). One of the most popular pickups in the US.
A key selling point is that the cabin is so high you can run over toddlers without even noticing."
Lovely people as always. Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
> Would you like to live neighbours with this person, or share communal facilities with him?
Sure why not? Because they made that comment? It’s not that they buy trucks because they are much taller than a short person but they still are. I’d rather not live next to the person with the dangerous truck.
If you can read people, you know a person like this is going to be constantly invading your privacy, inventing conflicts and complaining. Probably trying to make you join in his vendetta against some neighbour, and if you decline he will make a vendetta behind your back against you.
These kind of people are so easy to spot once you have some experience.
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> Would you like to live neighbours with this person
Sure, because he has a sense of humor.
Their cynicism is cope. They are witnessing their own decline every single day. It's honestly so sad. On the other side of the globe there is Tesla [1]. Even if you don't like the idea of cars, this is the pinnacle of a utilitarian product. Also one of the most popular vehicles (globally) as opposed to the (incorrect) example used in the thread.
Modern cars are great for the most parts. More comfortable, more safe, more autonomous, bigger, better and faster. Of course not all cars are created equal.
Cars are a resilient mode of transport. Even if road maintenance stops for 30 years due to some kind of crisis, a society with cars will be way more functional than one that was solely reliant on a centralized transportation system. And this is not an unrealistic scenario, people are just used to the last 80 years of peace due to rapid economic growth and globalization.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ve_ttBEPw
Electric cars could have paved the way to practical, utilitarian vehicles through their less-moving-parts, simpler nature. Instead, what we got were IoT gadgets on wheels, and Tesla is a pinnacle of that. It's about as far from a utilitarian product as you can get. Every modern Tesla vehicle is a definition of software-over-hardware and form-over-function. In your hypothetical 30 year apocalypse scenario, no one would be driving a Tesla, because their "utilitarian" Steam Early Access-like self-driving would cease once people can no longer pay the subscription fee for it, their single-point-of-failure screens break with no way to replace them (after all, the utilitarian designers were most concerned with making it look cool rather than lasting a long time), and because the overcomplicated door handles would stop working, as again, it was worth it for how cool they looked. In addition to 1000 other issues, like if they happened to get stuck on a bad software revision that breaks some random feature. "Most fast and break things" for cars, now that's utilitarianism. Tesla's physical build quality is widely known as being some of the worst in the market of luxury new cars. Nothing about them is conducive to longevity. In your apocalypse where there is no road maintenance and no spare parts, we'd be driving either the barebones self-propelled transport (bikes and such), or the absolute simplest cars you can fix yourself, such as... the subject of this thread, for instance. Or really, many similar cars from that era which that thing represents. Modern cars have gotten better in many regards - efficiency or safety-oriented design, for example - but in others, they've gotten so, so much worse. Longevity and repairability is down, what's in is hammering subscription-based, DRMed, badly designed things-as-a-service into every industry, including the automotive industry. That's what people are cynical about.
> They are witnessing their own decline every single day. It's honestly so sad.
What is so sad is being so stuck-up in whatever opinions you have as to think that people cannot genuinely in good faith have opinions other than yours, that everyone must surely know this objective truth you believe and that it's everyone else who's insanely deluding themselves from confronting this reality that you in your wisdom bring to them.
I'd rather live next to that guy than a guy with a big-ass truck, since I walk around my neighbourhood quite a lot.
the neighbour with a big-ass truck will help you shovel your drive-way, and invite you to a barbecue. This guy will leave an angry note on your door because you forgot your porch light on, or infringed on his laundry time.
Now I want one….
Just to be clear: I was a kid at that time and although the Citroen 2CV was a cool looking car the C15 was just as fugly back then as it is today. A fucking fuglier than fugly piece of ugly shit that was, already back then, making the world uglier for everybody.
I don't dispute that it was useful and reliable: I remember the milkman and plumbers and electricians having these. Note that some had a 2CV and would just cut off the roof (don't tell me it wasn't a thing: I've got pictures of me as a kid in a 2CV whose roof was cut).
Only the french have the "taste" to create such uglyness as the C15. It's hard to understand how a country can both produce the Concorde and the C15.
Even the russian and their Lada brand never managed to create something as fugly as the 4L or the C15.
Now you'll excuse me but I've got to take a look at what nature produces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird-of-paradise
Because that C15 brings back memories from a traumatizing time where uglyness was ruling the world.
P.S: I owned a Citroen VISA: it's hard to tell if it was only the 2nd ugliest Citroen ever after the C15 (indisputably the fugliest of them all) because Citroen produced soooo many turds.
>"I call bullshit ..."
Does anyone give a fuck? People can and do have plenty of reasons not to stick to a single model of car
When we lived in a more rural area, and I drove my kids to school each morning (in a normal-sized sedan), I taught them to notice the contents of the SUVs they saw. The common pattern, like 90% of the time in the morning, was a lady driver in a spotless SUV with a kid in the very back row of seats.
And the demographics made sense: you’d expect to see more moms dropping off kids, at least in redder parts of the country, and the back row is supposed safest (as long as you only plan on getting into head-on collisions). Still, the common theme of a ridiculous vehicle with exactly 2 occupants sitting in the farthest possible positions from each other came to be funny to us.
Those ludicrous pavement princess pieces of junk are status symbols of conspicuous consumption, and that’s it.
Now, a pickup with tool racks or lumber in the back, or covered with drywall dust, or bearing a ranch sticker? Fine. Those make perfect sense. Anything short of that is just bragging about how much you love donating to Exxon, like an NRA sticker but dumber.
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Won't impress friends/chicks as an F150 or a Land Rover Discovery /s
On a more serious note real (which is a minority) owners of bigger trucks need some serious torque for hauling.
I must have missed a memo, because every situation in which I've ever wanted to "impress a chick" has taken place indoors, or at least far from roads.
And yet lots of guys seem to spend an extra $30k or more on their vehicle for no additional utility beyond that. Literally who is impressed?
Then again, these are probably dudes who get their dating advice from the Tate brothers. /shrug
Closeted gays trying to impress other dudes, idk?
It’s like those huge bodybuilders: you’re picturing being surrounded by chicks, while realistically it’s other buff dudes miring your physique.
Everyone is always hauling. Lol.
All non-Americans know Americans sleep 8 hrs a day, work 8 hrs a day, and haul 8 hrs a day.
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Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's the last thing we need here. (Well, tied for last.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Where did you see angriness in this thread?
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Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is. It only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I do get heat for my truck. I call it the truckasourus, it does take up a lot of room, I pulled out the rear seat and installed a three level shelf that fills the whole back of the cab, tools, grocieries, more tools, laundry, more food, and room on the top shelf to sleep if nessesary, then a 8 foot box, that will get replaced with a 9' flat deck, and front, middle and rear racks so I can move 24'steel, 4x8 sheets, welding gas, and whatever else, when I am not moving round bales or fire wood, other large heavy clumsy stuff. funny thing is that I have a car just for more civilised things, that costs me almost as much to sit there, as my truck costs to drive. I flashed the eprom in the truck so it gets significantly better fuel milage, and has forgotten how to go into limp mode, though the messages in the dash are dire. I could build a smaller rig, but it would fail in 1/3 of the tasks required, so it is impossible to come out ahead with running two, or hireing moving services. So the article, while funny, is narrow and snippy. Sometimes I consider a bumper sticker that would say, "Thanks for driving a Prius, I need the fuel!"
What a hideous hunk of sheet metal
the milquetoast attempts at casting poorly-targeted stones at the beginning of this article really bring it down. Plenty of rural brits share exactly the same mentality, this just stinks of lack of cultural experience.
it's a great vehicle, and I applaud the french approach to cars.
Truly rural Brits - Northumbria, the Devon uplands, Yorkshire Moors, the remoter parts of Scotland & Wales, sure.
Thing with England is that, being a small, flat and largely well-connected country, there's lots of places that identify strongly as rural but are, economically and culturally, more like outer-suburbia in a US context. That's where you'll find the Defender and F-150 crowd.
Brits are usually pretty good at taking the piss…
He forgets the part where because of emissions requirements the C15 can't be driven in that scourge the people the author defends call "low emissions zones".
Good so the car won't be killing people due to high noxious emissions.
Stick a petrol version of the engine in (Peugeot XU instead of XUD) and convert it to run on propane. There you go, now the exhaust is just water and carbon dioxide, and you don't die from breathing it in. No CO, no HC, and not really any more NOx that was in the air it sucked in.
This is why forklifts run on gas, instead of petrol or diesel.
We could have had incredibly clean air in our cities 25 years ago, if the government hadn't decided that pushing "scrappage schemes" to get people to buy "cleaner greener diesels" was cheaper.
If you want to live in polluted areas there are plenty of places available on Earth for that, I believe most people would rather not. Low emissions zones are mostly in very densely populated areas where the impact of pollution is higher, not sure why you consider that a scourge.
Could you expand on why?
People who don't live in France may not know why low emission zones are so stupid: it's not about how much pollution your car emits, but how old it is.
So you're not allowed to bring a 20 years old car even if it's small, light and as a result doesn't pollute that much (because of its low fuel consumption). However you're allowed to bring in your brand new SUV even if its emissions are much higher. In fact it doesn't matter how much your SUV pollutes, it's recent so it's "fine".
Do you know you usually drive 20+ cars? Poor people. Do you know who loves restrictions on old cars? Car manufacturers.
> Could you expand on why?
Perhaps I'm a plumber going to work on a house in a LEZ? Perhaps I need to deliver something? Perhaps deliver to the airport (!) inside the LEZ.
There are all kinds of reasons why someone might need to take a van into an LEZ, if you think for more than about quarter a second.
This is primarily a reason why you shouldn't drive a vehicle from the 1970s, as the article suggests, and why LEZs need practicality not to drive service inflation inside the area.
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I'm just poking a gigantic hole on the hypocrisy of the author. I am not interested in that discussion.
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https://eupolicy.social/@jmaris/115860595509967609
CO2 is a bit of an outlier in the groups of pollutants emitted by a car. Modern cars will emit way less of the other pollutants that are directly unhealthy for humans to breathe (NOx, CO, particulate matter, etc.).
I know the thread is mostly for fun, but only considering CO2 is a bit misleading when accessing how environmentally (un)friendly a car is.
That does not matter. It only complies with Euro 3 emissions requirements.
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Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it? My pickup truck wants to know. But it doesn't have to worry, because my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
In fact it looks like the love child my Ford F350 and a Citroen C2. But it can't be because I had the Ford fixed.
> Can you fit an 8'x4' sheet of plywood in it?
If you keep the rear doors open, the cargo platform is 1644 by 1540 (mm), 8x4 would be 2438 by 1219.
Most likely you'd just put sheet goods on the roof (and yes roof racks for panel vans were common, still are).
> my other main use for it is as a large gas powered wheel barrow for carrying yard waste, and the little enclosed C15 can't compete.
You can certainly put yard waste in a C15, though people usually use a trailer for that (unless there's little enough of it it fits in a large builder / garden bag).
Someone pointed out that a lot of US builders will drive pickups truck, and that it's kinda doesn't make sense, why don't they drive a van? Depending on the trade and location builders and contractors here will drive something like a VW Transporter, Mercedes Sprinter, Toyota HiAce or a Peugeot Partner. The Sprinter will fit e.g. your plywood, others will have mounts on the side or roof to transport material.
They won't act as a large wheelbarrow though, not well at least.
Tradespeople in the US often have both vans and trucks, depending on how they want to use them. Both are very common.
None will tow my 30' fifth wheel very far.
There's not enough room in a van. You need a F350 super duty to properly haul stuff.
When my kids were small, we bought a minivan and it was pretty awesome. I really hadn’t thought much about it until…
A couple of years ago, I rented one to help my kids move into college. It was a Chrysler of some kind and now I’m kind of tempted to buy one. The seats disappear into the floor and then you can carry full sheets of plywood. It’s front wheel drive and drives like a car. Super comfortable, super configurable, good visibility, lots of cup holders, climate controls, power outlets, and reasonably fuel efficient (for what it is). But it’s just sooooo dorky.
> But it’s just sooooo dorky
The hedonistic treadmill of family cars is so funny to me. First station wagons were the soccer mom car, so everyone got minivans, then minivans were the soccer mom car so everyone got SUVs, and now crossovers. What's next? When do we get to loop around like fashion does?