Citroen Karin: A Look At One Of The '80s Most Radical Concept Cars
The 1980s were one of the major heydays for bizarre concept cars. Alongside changing notions of design and fashion, automotive manufacturers were getting more experimental with their process, dreaming up wild, fascinating cars just for the heck of it. Obviously, these concept cars never made any particular impact on the automotive industry at large, but it's still fascinating to see what kind of directions creators will go in when given a pencil and told to go nuts.
Perhaps one of the epitomes of this creative spirit was the Citroën Karin, a concept vehicle introduced on a lark by the French automotive brand Citroën at the 1980 Paris Motor Show. With the only missive from above to make literally any concept to show off at the event, designer Trevor Fiore dreamed up a pyramid-like vehicle that looks like something off the cover of a pulp sci-fi novel. The car never moved past the model stage, of course, but the mere idea of it paints an interesting picture of where dreams of the future were at the time.
One pointy ride
The Karin model created by Fiore was never intended to become a drivable vehicle, just something fun that Citroën could show off at the Motor Show in lieu of any actual new developments from the brand. This is probably why the car features quite possibly the smallest roof on any car ever, conceptual or real, with the metal bit at the top being about the size of a typical sheet of paper. Connecting that tiny roof to the rest of the car were several massive slabs of angled glass, resulting in a sloped look not dissimilar to a mobile pyramid. It's not even clear how you would get inside this vehicle, as no available pictures of it show it with its doors open.
Those who witnessed the Karin at the Motor Show tried to find a signature aspect that could be traced to any other Citroën vehicle. Reporters apparently likened the front and rear lights to those present on the Citroën SM, though even that similarity is a bit tenuous. The body of the Karin is truly one-of-a-kind, which is probably why Citroën never dared to make another, functional one.
Dashboard like a spaceship
While the exterior of the Karin is the most immediately eye-catching aspect, the interior is just as bizarre. Rather than the usual 2x2 seat layout, the Karin opted instead for a 1x2 layout, with a single centered seat in front of the dashboard and two passenger seats behind it. It was less like a car and more like a spaceship, not just in its layout, but in its controls.
Instead of the usual array of vehicle controls you'd find across the dashboard, the Karin's controls were all centralized around and within the steering wheel. Switches corresponding to various functions layered the wheel's external casing, while any leftover functions were relegated to a pair of small keypads on the wheel's bottom-right and bottom-left sides. There were even a set of phone dialing buttons on the center of the wheel, plus a distinctive monitor in the center of it all that, apparently, would screen and report on the state of the road.
While the Karin and its futuristic stylings never led to a real, drivable car, it could be said that it was something of a jetsetter in its time. After all, plenty of cars nowadays feature consolidated buttons, as well as built-in phones and live road monitoring. As for weird shapes? Well, considering the wedge-shaped Tesla Cybertruck, perhaps that glass pyramid wasn't such a far-off dream after all.