First drive: Citroen Ami One concept

Keeping the price low has also led to plenty of ingenious solutions for removing cost from the Ami One itself. Its big doors are identical and hinged at different ends as a consequence, the front panels are the same but don’t look it because they’re mounted at different heights and the wheelarches are identical, as are the tail-lights.

Despite this low-cost quest, the Ami One has a flip-back fabric roof and more space ahead of its driver than pretty much any other car – the attractively shaped dashboard, such as it is, quite some distance from you. The instruments are mounted on the steering column, to the right of which is a neat rotary gear selector. For connectivity, music, sat-nav and all other digital desires, drivers use their phones, for which a specific Ami One app is available that bundles all your required and relevant apps into one easily usable arrangement.

The feeling of generous space is heightened by a windscreen that wraps into A-pillars that are effectively vertical, pulling them right out of the way. You need to travel back to the 1950s to find cars – mostly American – whose screens are designed that way.

All that space and plenty of colour make the Ami One's interior cheerily pleasant, the upbeat mood maintained by the soft jangling sound it makes once it’s on the move as a warning to other road users. Accelerate and the jangling speeds up. And even though this is the design department’s full-size model, it’s easy to see how zippy this car could be, not because it’s fast – not with a 28mph top speed – but because it’s easy to see out and to know where its colourful body starts and ends.

There’s no high-torque electric whizz from rest, because this is a concept, but you can be sure that a production version would hit 30mph swiftly enough to keep up with bigger beasts. And it would be a hell of a lot more manoeuvrable.

Production, however, is not what the Ami One is destined for. The ideas it contains, from the shared panels to its electric propulsion system and its usage and ownership models, Citroën will continue to work on, says Belloni. 

A low-cost urban transport vehicle is imperative when, as Citroën boss Linda Jackson points out, "68% of the world’s population will live in cities". This statistic, she says, was the key driver for this concept. Don’t expect the Ami One, but do expect something similar from Citroën in time.

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