Failed, but still fun
Citroën celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the C3 Pluriel. It remains unclear whether the cake is cut because of the birthday itself, or because people are happy that it has been so long since this remarkable device made it to the production stage.
Some birthdays are better to skip. That applies to some from the moment the age to be celebrated starts with a ‘3’, but in the case of the Citroën C3 Pluriel it has more to do with the birthday person himself. The Pluriel was, to put it mildly, not the most successful idea Citroën ever had.
The convertible version of the first Citroën C3 appeared in the spring of 2003 and did everything completely different from other compact convertibles, which were still plentiful at that time. Instead of the steel folding roof that was very fashionable at the time, made bigger by group colleague Peugeot 206 CC, Citroën opted for a solution that is unique to this day with an extremely variable roof. That could be pushed back just like that of a Fiat 500C (which was not there at the time). In addition, the roof could stop wherever you wanted: above the rear window, on the rear window (day view), or below the rear window, in which case the entire combination of roof and window had to be manually stopped behind the bottom-hinged tailgate .
What remained were the roof arches on the left and right. They literally bridged the distance between the aft deck and the mounting points at the top of the windshield. You could remove that and then the Citroën C3 Pluriel was a real, full-fledged convertible, with a fairly serious back seat, moreover. Unique for a compact convertible. Yet you rarely see a Pluriel without those roof arches, and there’s a very good reason for that. Those arches couldn’t go in the car, unless they were draped over the back seat and passenger seat like the colorful surfboards that are so inextricably linked to this type of leisure vehicle in the brochure – only in the brochure.
Admittedly: in the prolonged dry period in which we now find ourselves, we would still dare to leave those bows at home. Even then, however, the question is whether it is smart, because we noticed during the first tests that the car is even less stiff without the arches than with. ‘A true wokkel’, wrote a seventeen years younger Frank Jacobs in 2006. Add to that complaints about wind noise, rattling and leaks, and you raise eyebrows with us about the fact that Citroën celebrates the birthday of the C3 Pluriel with such enthusiasm.
And yet..
And yet… we can’t just be negative about the Pluriel. After all, the largely failed concept was the result of a kind of guts that no longer exists in the car world today. Now that every development euro apparently has to be spent on heavily to fully electrified crossovers that should appeal to every conceivable target group worldwide, the open C3 is an extra refreshing idea. Citroën went all out and provided the open C3 not only with a unique roof, but also with a unique and completely different coach compared to the regular C3.
Plus, weird cars tend to get funnier over time, and maybe that’s the case here too. Anyone who would like to drive open for little, in 2023 has a good one at the Pluriel. There is even enough choice for less than 3,000 euros, although the neatest ones are of course more expensive. In that ‘underclass’, this one from Oss is our favourite. The blue and silver gray make it look fresher in our opinion than the orange-and-black of the introduction photos, although that is also nice. This car also has a fairly low mileage, a real (and therefore not a robotized) manual gearbox, and an excellent owner history. Who offers?
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– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl