Cassette Futurism @lemm.ee Rei @piefed.social 2d ago

The Citroën Karin [Thread]

A three-quarter photo of the car, but it's beige now
A top-down photo of the car, showing it only has three seats with the steering wheel in front of the middle seat
A photo of the back of the car, where is has Karin written between the taillights
A photo of the interior, where the all the console buttons are clustered on the frame around the steering wheel and the steering wheel is shaped like a pie with and missing piece on the bottom
The another photo of the interior but from a front facing angle where you can see the instrument cluster looks like a crt television screen
A concept car from 1980, design by Trevor Fiore

Looks kinda undrivable tbh

26 comments

What's the logic in putting the driver's seat in the middle?
- Style, baby!
  
  You can't actually sit under the sloped side windows.
  
  Also noticing the control panel that's on the floor, for some reason. Not to mention a lack of any sort of seatbelts. I know concept cars are not really meant to ever go to production but this one seems particularly silly.
- So you can have your wife on one side and your mistress on the other. Gotta keep them separated. Duh!
  
  🎶🎧🎶
- The McLaren F1 supercar has three seats with the driver in the middle. I couldn't see the reason on the wiki page but do recall seeing a short documentary on it many years ago that did mention why. I just can't recall it unfortunately.
- Some benefits for exports too, I suppose. No need to build an RHD version for Britain, Japan, and the others that drive on the left
- Concept cars often put creative design ahead of practicality.
Man, I remember seeing this as a kid in an 1982(1980?) edition of the german AutoKatalog and it friggin blew my mind. It felt so out of this world.
Sometimes you've got to just put questionable aesthetics above function until the only possible use for it is to awkwardly demonstrate an ethos of individualism based solely on exorbitant privilege.
- Keep going. I'm almost there.
as a nerd who dabbled with photography in the past the diagonal shot of the interior is just sooooo good. damn

the lighting is near perfect.
- At a glance, I'm thinking that's the planar view from the glass.
Absolutely love it. I mean, I don't really like the aesthetics all that much, and I can see several impractical things about the design, but I love the reimagination of what a car should look like.

There are plenty of practical reasons why most modern cars follow the same morphology, and any concept that deviates from that quite rightly has some hard questions to answer about safety, but it's not boring, and that earns a lot of goodwill in my book.
I like its undeniable Frenchness 🇫🇷🗼Not so much the practicality
- I too use the Japanese TV tower emoji when I can't find the Eiffel tower and go something like "eh, close enough".
  
  I find the omission insulting and I'm not even French.
- One person in this entire thread gets it.
This is the pinnacle of car design.

... (c:
What in the name of all that's holy is this absolute abomination?
- One of the elder cousins that gave birth to the inbred beast Ewon penetrated to create the "cyber" cuckbucket of today
Ewwww! Its like the cybertruck but worse! Too round.
- lol I was going to say the exact opposite - “the cybertruck wishes it was this cool”
- Kinda but not really. This one is clearly pyramid shaped, and pyramids are cool, while the Cybertruck is just a double sided door stop, but less useful.

26 comments