When doors were still allowed to be thin
08/12/2022
The door of a Citroën 2 CV was thinner than a sandwich. And the photo does not show a 60-year-old veteran, but a duck from the 1980s. The 2 CV had these doors until the end of its production period and they show how lightweight construction was possible.
It is also clear that you can't fit a power window mechanism or electric motors in doors that are two centimetres thick. And the thin doors were hardly any good against collisions either. But they did protect against rainwater or cold winds. The window then opened outwards (front) or not at all (rear). On the other hand, almost the entire width of the body was available to passengers, so the Ente offered plenty of space, considering that it was only 1480 mm wide and had protruding fenders like a pre-war car. No pontoon design.
Today, these thin-walled and lightweight doors look wonderfully nostalgic and if one accidentally slams shut and the leg is still out, the pain is limited. Today, the legislator would probably intervene if such a vehicle were to be registered for road traffic in large numbers ...
P.S. Incidentally, the failure of the Ente was not due to a lack of safety but to the emissions produced and the fact that many people preferred more modern vehicles to the post-war concept of the 2 CV at the end of the 1980s.
