There is no reason on Earth why a French car maker cannot make a convincing luxury premium car. No reason at all. No objective, rational reason. And yet...
Let me lay my cards out. In spite of all the frequent bad publicity over unreliability, and in spite of having come face to face with that spectre myself having once owned a Renault Laguna (I know, I know...), I do love French cars. I think any true car nut does - despite all our passion for German solidity or Italian insanity, there is just something about the insouciant style of a classic Citroen, Renault or the stolid sensibleness of a Peugeot from the seventies or eighties that is massively, massively appealing.
There is no shortage, either, of truly expensive and successful French luxury brands outside the motoring sphere. After all, wander in to Brown Thomas of a rainy afternoon and you can bask in the backlit splendour of Chanel, Hermes or Givenchy. Even some famously Swiss brands, such as Tag Heuer or Zenith watches, are actually French-owned - part of the sprawling LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) group that includes such as Christian Dior, Dom Pérignon, Givenchy and Bulgari. Have an Activia yoghurt or some Evian water with your lunch today? French. The fastest and highest-flying passenger aircraft of all time? The Anglo-French Concorde.
So why can't that success and experience be translated to cars? Well the thing is that it can, but even when it is we pig-headedly usually manage to ignore it.
All this was kicked off by a recent test drive of the updated DS 5. Yes, it used to be the Citroen DS5, but now, of course, DS is its own sub-brand as PSA Group attempts to find some separation between its day-to-day Citroens and a new line-up of luxury cars that are supposed to challenge BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz.
All fine. As I said, I like French cars and the original 1955 DS (not to mention its seventies successors, the CX, GS and amazing SM) is among my all-time favourite cars. As it should be. So, even since its 2010 launch, I've been primed to really like the DS 5. At first it disappointed. OK, I thought - give them a chance, first time back in the premium market for a while... The car was mildly updated and fettled. And still it was disappointing. But then came the big change, DS as a separate brand, no more Citroen chevrons, new face and new engines. Still a massive, honking disappointment.
The road test will be written elsewhere, but let me give you the bullet points. Beautiful? Certainly. Gorgeous interior? Yup. But the ride quality is terrible (more noisy and jittery than actually hard), the steering is terrible and there's no useable space in the cabin. And it costs €36k. Oh and indeed dear.
So, we're back to the ever-asked question: why can't the French make a convincing luxury car? The answer comes in three parts...
Part one is that luxury cars don't sell in France, so you're dealing with a group of designers who live in a country that actually mostly rejects luxury cars. Most French people drive simple, functional family wagons - always have. For all its luxury and avant-garde design features, that original DS of 1955 was actually really a hugely stylish family car. Sit in one now and marvel at the space and comfort.
France is also the nation that gave us the MPV (the Renault Espace and the Scenic) and which can rival Britain in the creation of heroically brilliant, solidly simple family cars. For every Mini, Morris Minor and Mk1 Cortina, I give you the Renault 4, Renault 16 and Peugeot 404. Or what about my personal favourite, the Peugeot 505 estate? Big, comfy, reliable (well, the engines were anyway) and endlessly spacious. But not a luxury car. Not a BMW competitor. France buys affordable cars. QED.
The second answer to the question (which leads into the third answer) is that, actually, French companies can build convincing luxury and sporting cars. Back in the nineties, Alpine was still a going concern (Renault is currently in the process of reviving it) and it had the A610, an oddball plastic-bodied Porsche 911 rival with a 2.9-litre V6 engine slung out behind the back wheels and, just, seats for four. It was a fantastic car to drive and almost sci-fi in its styling, and it suffered from none of the tricky on-the-limit handling issues of 911s from the early nineties. No-one bought one though.
Let's try again. In 2005, Citroen launched the C6 and my brain almost exploded. Here was a car that was, to my mind, a match for that original DS in style terms. From its low-slung nose to that pert rear end with the concave rear window, it was just stunning. Inside it was not massively spacious, but certainly enormously comfortable and had door bin covers that slid up and down with a beautifully oleaginous motion.
And it had that classic, wonderful Citroen Hydragas suspension, which meant that instead of clattering your way over bumps as a contemporary BMW 5 Series on its rock-hard run-flat tyres would do, you floated and wafted along in nigh-perfect comfort. Was it a bit vague going around corners? Yes, but it just wasn't a sporty kind of car - it was built for long Autoroute journeys with squidgy set to maximum. I loved it, thought it was essentially perfect.
No-one bought one. And that's the third answer. Even when French car makers make brilliant high-end cars, we pig-headedly don't buy them. Cowed and cornered by a lethal combination of marketing, peer pressure and residual value predictions, we always buy German when we're spending big.
There are some glimmers of hope. The little DS 3, itself just facelifted and brought into the new DS brand styling fold, has always been a cracking little fun hatch. The basic models might be a bit plastic but the 1.6 THP versions are a match in the fun stakes for the current MINI Cooper and more roomy and practical to boot. The 200hp Racing version was just flat-out fantastic. So, proof at least that once in a while, when a French company makes a great car, we do buy it in reasonable numbers. Still, the 400,000-odd DS 3s thus far sold rather pales in comparison to the number of MINIs BMW's Plant Oxford has cranked out.
It's a crying shame. Why should Munich, Ingolstadt and Stuttgart have a monopoly on pricey cars? Nothing wrong with those products of course, but surely we can have a little more imagination, a little less homogeneousness. With BMW 3 Series and Audi A4s fast becoming as ubiquitous as once was the rep-friendly Mondeo, I personally really fancy a change. I would love to have more of the whiff of the Élysée Palace or the Place de la Concorde than the Ruhr Valley as I waft my way to work.
What about the rest of you? Come on; throw off the shackles of the German oppressor! Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!