Piedmont Street Sighting - 1978 Citroën GS Pallas

Today marks the third day of the fabled countdown to Christmas.

On the third day of Christmas my archives give to thee:
A beige French shed,
Tuned Chevy LUV,
and a Park Lane down on the street.

Oh hon hon, French cars are weird. It's almost disappointing if you find one that isn't weird. The Citroën GS is unusual in that it looks like it would be a hatchback or liftback, but it's actually a fastback styled sedan with a small vertical trunk lid that hinges up like a garage door. The design with its sharp Kamm tail and sloping roofline was one of the most aerodynamic cars in the world in 1970 when it was introduced. The GS featured an advanced hydropneumatic suspension system based on the technology of the larger DS, as well as four-wheel disc brakes. It came with the Citroën trademark one-spoke steering wheel and a rotating drum speedometer. The latter was swapped out for conventional dials for the 1977 model year. For all that technology baked into the chassis, the GS came with an air cooled flat four sending barely 60 horsepower to the front wheels. And if you look closely at the grille, it looks like it still has a hole to insert a hand crank for emergency manual starting.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1969 Citroën DS21 Pallas

I've thus far been fortunate to come across not one but three Citroën DSs in San Francisco. Of those, I've been able to photograph two of them in depth. The first was the grey 1970 DS21 I spotted in the Lower Haight, another was a clean black example I caught driving in the east Mission near Potrero Hill (only got one or two shots of that while it was stopped in traffic). And then there was this one, found near the famous twists of Lombard Street on Russian Hill.