Retour à L'Envoyeur: Driving a Citroën CX from New York to France - Feature
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Steel yourself, dear reader, for a bombshell: You cannot buy a new French car in America. You haven’t been able to for 20 years, since 1991, when Peugeot ejected from the United States following a long and nasty sales slump.
Maybe this is not news to you. Maybe those 20 years have seemed a deprived eternity, like an undeserved prison sentence or the wait for drinks in a Parisian restaurant. But chances are greater that you don’t give a rip. The nation that blessed us with the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Citroën DS also gave us a lot of forgettable automotive garbage. Decades after the Gauls left, questions linger: What have we missed? Why don’t French cars work here? If Alfa Romeo and Fiat can return, should Peugeot, Citroën, and Renault? And if Dominique Strauss-Kahn didn’t grope that New York maid, who did?
In our search for answers, we found a half-dead Citroën on eBay for the sacré-crapcan price of $1500. Then, in the interest of science, we drove it to France. The goal was to learn something about the cultural divide, or to maybe kill the car and bury it in its homeland. But mostly, we just wanted to give the damn thing back. Ideally in exchange for something still French but better and more reliable, like, say, a pack of cigarettes.
Source: Car and Driver