QOTD: What Do You Think of Citroën's New Logo?

Now that Stellantis owns Citroën, there's a chance North America may see automobiles wearing French badges populating its streets once again. However, the corporate emblem may look a little different from the one you remember – assuming you're old enough to recall seeing them before the company pulled out of the market in 1974.

While the chevrons haven’t gone anywhere, they’re now encapsulated in a roundel that harkens back to the ovoid Citroën badges of yesteryear. Officially, the manufacturer said the new design was directly inspired by the original 1919 emblems selected by founder André-Gustave Citroën. At the time, old André wanted the piece to be tied to the herringbone gear system where two opposite helical gears meet to create a V shape, and felt a couple of chevrons encapsulated in an oval wheel served as the perfect representation.

Color always seemed less important, however. While some automakers are intrinsically linked to specific colors – Ford or BMW, for example – Citroën’s former adherence to yellows and dark blues hasn’t played much of a role since the 1980s. This new graphic is effectively a redux of the original badge and doesn’t seem to have a preferred palette. Citroën showed the redesign off in a series of hues, with tomato red being the most common so far. Technically, this color is called “Infra-Red” and will be replacing the signature red the brand used to use. But most corporate materials will have the logo in grayscale with its name running across the bottom in an updated font.

We’ve actually seen the basic shape crop up before. The manufacturer slapped it onto the all-electric 19_19 Concept that debuted in (you guessed it) 2019. While not identical to the version we’re looking at now, it shows that the company had been considering the change for a while and was looking into the past for inspiration.

Citroën said the updated roundel would “initiate a new direction in product design language in which the visually prominent badge will become an immediately recognizable signature element of all Citroën models.”

The company even previewed the new logo on what is very obviously a concept vehicle, stating that it was an upcoming model intended for families. That’s pretty broad and the only other items we have to go by are extremely tight photos of the grille where the words “Nothing Moves Us Like Citroen” are carved into it. That particular phrase happens to be the brand’s new slogan and is pretty clever until you realize that these vehicles eventually start breaking down. But maybe nobody will think to mock it if the brand decides to slap it onto production cars.

While the vehicle in question is assumed to pop up at the 2022 Paris Motor Show in October, if not sooner, the new logo won’t see active duty until the middle of next year. Though we still don’t know if Citroën plans to fit it on existing models, or simply roll it out gradually on new models as part of its evolving design language.

[Images: Citroën]

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