Concept cars sometimes have truly original shapes. This is the case of Citroen Karina car that has a unique pyramid shape. It was designed by Trevor Fiore, a designer of Italian origins who had studied in Great Britain and had become head of Citroen’s Styling Department.
The name is a reference to the word “car”, which means “car” in English, and the Italian word “cute”. It debuted at the Paris Motor Show in 1980but it never became standard.
Butterfly wing doors
The Citroen Karin belongs to an era in which designers could give great vent to their imagination, presenting bold solutions. The Karin’s roof, for starters, is one of the smallest ever, more or less the same size as a sheet of A3 ledger paper.
The form the pyramid it houses two doors that open upwards, like a butterfly. In Citroen’s imagination it is a middle class car, a bizarre-looking coupé, with a very slim profile and a particularly low center of gravity.
The engine is a 4 cylinders combined with front-wheel drive and Citroen’s typical hydropneumatic suspension until 2015 (after 60 years of history, the latest evolution of the system, Hydractiva III, ended its life cycle with the C5).
Lots of state-of-the-art buttons and monitors
The Karin’s interior is very interesting because it is particularly futuristic. Seating is for a maximum of three peoplearranged in an original way: the driver is positioned in the center and the two passengers just behind him on the sides, a style reminiscent of that of the McLaren F1 released more than a decade later.
Photo: Citroën
Citroen Karin, the interior
There are many buttons, located everywhere, even on the door panels, which have some integrated monitors. On the dashboard, however, there is a screen that includes a calculator capable of showing the state of the road and that of the vehicle. Something avant-garde for its time and very common today.
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Source: it.motor1.com
