Danville Street Sighting - 1986 Citroën 2CV

One of the things I like about researching for this blog is deciphering license plates. The seemingly random letter and number patterns, various colors and shapes tell a story about the car they're installed on. Sometimes an online resource like California's smog test database yields the model year of an unusual older vehicle. But when it's an import from another country, especially a European model that was built for a long time with few obvious visual changes, having an original plate gives more clues about it. Case in point here with this Citroën 2CV I stumbled upon in Danville.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1977 Citroën 2CV6

San Francisco is known for many things, good or bad, and one of those things is a high population of old French cars. To date, I've featured seven classic Citroëns, all of them spotted in the city of San Francisco. This '77 2CV is number 8. And there are more on the way in the future.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1972 Citroën 2CV4

Fourth in my collection of San Francisco cars photographed and featured by both myself and by my friend Colin Stacy of The Automotive Way, is this 1972 Citroën 2CV4.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1984 Citroën 2CV Charleston

It seems that people with Citroën 2CVs attract shutterbugs like myself. The 2CV with its cartoonish proportions and roll-back fabric sunroof, especially a later-model Charleston special edition with its deep red and black paint, separated by a cheeky swoosh, is a magnet for attention. Millions of the little cars were sold worldwide over four decades, but America was hardly Citroën's best market. I suppose that when you're pinning your hopes on the small and underpowered but very advanced DS as a luxury car in a market dominated by chrome-laden V8 boats, it doesn't do well for the company's upscale image to field a 2-cylinder garden shed on wheels in the same dealership. It was no secret that the 2CV was intended to be a peasant's car from the beginning. Citroën didn't even actively advertise the Deux Chevaux here, and a lot of the cars that exist in the USA were imported later.