Past masters

I’d thought it a case of reach exceeding grasp, or perhaps sheer hubris which lay behind the repeated but doomed decisions of French car makers to enter the prestige luxury market over the years. But then I was leafing through Saint Loup’s biography of Louis Renault called, imaginatively enough, Renault and I changed my mind…

I’d just driven the new electric DS No 8, the latest flagship luxury vehicle brought to us by the Stellantis car manufacturing giant, and rather wished I hadn’t.

DS is named not after the French intelligence agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, which shares the acronym, but the original 1955 déesse (‘goddess’) DS saloon, designed by Flaminio Bertoni and engineered by André Lefèbvre. Of such beauty and distinction, the DS was named the ‘new Nautilus’ by philosopher Roland Barthes, who suggested it was an object from another world.