Her Majesty Drives Herself

There is a moment, about forty seconds into the opening of The Longest Yard, where Burt Reynolds throws a stolen Citroën SM through a suburban Florida driveway with Lynyrd Skynyrd howling over the top, and every single person watching in 1974 had exactly the same thought at exactly the same time: what in God's name is that?

It's the correct reaction. It remains the correct reaction. The SM does not look like a car that was designed; it looks like a car that was arrived at, the way you arrive at a mathematical proof — long nose, glass eyes, shoulders that taper in plan view like a teardrop pulled through a wind tunnel, rear wheels tucked under skirts and set two hundred millimeters closer together than the front ones. It is 4.9 meters of French governmental confidence with an Italian racing engine bolted in behind the front axle, riding on green spheres of pressurised nitrogen, steering with two turns lock to lock and no feedback whatsoever, and stopping — according to Popular Science, which tested a great many cars — shorter than anything else they had ever strapped a fifth wheel to.

Reynolds' character puts it in the water at the end of the scene. The car was fished out, badly bent, and bought on the spot by one of the film's producers for a reported $7,000, which at the time was most of a new Camaro. That is the SM in one anecdote: even wrecked, even soaked, even after being deliberately abused by a Hollywood stunt team, somebody wanted it enough to write a check before it had finished dripping.

Section 01 — OriginsNine years in a locked room

The SM did not begin as a Maserati anything. In 1961 — six years after the DS had landed at the Paris Salon and made every other car on earth look like agricultural equipment — Citroën opened a file marked Projet S. The S stood for Sport. The brief was modest: build a faster DS.

What followed was nine years of running prototypes, each one more expensive and more complicated than the last, drifting steadily upmarket in a way that anybody who has ever "just tidied up" a kitchen renovation will recognize. Somewhere in that decade the project stopped being a hot DS and started being a clean-sheet flagship — in engineering hours, a car of DS-scale ambition rather than a DS with a bigger carburetor. Citroën, an engineering-led company run by engineers who answered mostly to other engineers, did not notice that it had wandered into a market segment that, in France, legally did not exist.

Citroën needed an engine, and Citroën's engine cupboard contained a four-cylinder designed in the Truman administration and a Wankel program that would eventually help bankrupt the company. So in 1968 it did the most Citroën thing imaginable and simply bought Maserati.

Not a licensing deal. Not a supply contract. The whole company. Trident, Modena, Giulio Alfieri, the lot.

Section 02 — The engineSix weeks, allegedly. Ninety degrees, definitely.

Alfieri's brief was gorgeous in its cruelty: design an all-new, compact, lightweight, four-cam V6 that Citroën can tax-dodge into a 2.7-liter box — and make sure it can be built on the tooling we already have for the Maserati V8.

That last clause is why the SM's V6 has a 90-degree angle between its banks instead of the 60 degrees that a six actually wants. It's a V8 architecture with two cylinders missing, which normally produces an engine that shakes like a paint mixer. Alfieri got around it with offset crankpins and, frankly, with the sort of nerve that only works if you are very good at your job. The result weighed 140 kg — 309 lb, all aluminum, four chain-driven camshafts, three twin-choke Webers — and Citroën mounted it behind the front axle line, which is a sentence worth reading twice. This is a front-wheel-drive car whose engine sits inboard of the wheels it drives, in the position a mid-engined car would use if the driver sat further back.

The same engine went on to power the Maserati Merak, in enlarged form, for a decade. Turbocharge it a bit and you get the Biturbo, of which Maserati sold roughly 40,000 — an engine family that outlived by a factor of three the car it was invented for.

Section 03 — The lineupWhere it sat, and how strange that was

To understand what the SM meant, look at what Citroën was selling next to it in 1971. A 2CV: two cylinders, corrugated bodywork, designed to carry eggs across a ploughed field. An Ami. A GS — brilliant, air-cooled flat-four, hydropneumatic, and the reigning European Car of the Year. A DS, still the most advanced sedan in the world at sixteen years old. And then, at the top, the SM: twice the price of a DS, faster than anything else with front-wheel drive on the planet, and hand-finished with stainless-steel brightwork instead of chrome because chrome was considered cheap.

There was no rung between the DS and the SM. There was no Citroën coupé heritage to build on. There was no dealer network anywhere on earth trained to service a four-cam Italian racing V6. Citroën built the halo before it built the ladder — and then, in the great tradition of halo cars, discovered that the halo was structural.

In the United States it won Motor Trend's Car of the Year for 1972 outright — unheard of for an import at the time, and a decision that reads today like an act of civic bravery on the magazine's part.

Section 04 — The technologyAn inventory of things nobody else had

Here is the part where a normal car gets a paragraph and the SM gets a list, because a list is the only honest format.

DIRAVI: steering that isn't steering

Put 170 horsepower through the front wheels in 1970 and you get torque steer, which in period was solved by nobody. Citroën's answer was not to reduce feedback but to abolish it. DIRAVI is fully powered, not power-assisted: the driver's inputs are a request, and hydraulics do the work. Hit a pothole at 120 mph and the wheel does not move in your hands. It cannot. There is no mechanical path for the road to reach you.

Two turns lock to lock — go-kart quick. Speed-sensitive weighting via a hydraulic centering cam, so it's feather-light in a Paris parking space and heavy and deliberate on the autoroute, holding roughly constant effort at any speed. And a self-centering cam that returns the wheel to dead ahead if you let go of it, at a walking pace or at three figures.

Contemporary reviewers said it took about 50 miles to recalibrate your hands. Reviewers also said that once you had, everything else on the market felt like a rented rowing boat. Not everyone got there: when the SM was cast as a series regular in ITV's The Protectors in 1972, the lead actress flatly refused to drive it.

Hydropneumatics, but with a coupé's manners

Nitrogen spheres, LHM fluid, self-leveling, ride-height adjustable from the cabin. Inherited from the DS, retuned entirely for a car meant to cross France in an afternoon rather than glide through it. The suspension does not merely absorb bumps; it declines to acknowledge them.

Brakes that outbraked everything

Discs at all four corners — the DS still had rear drums — with the fronts mounted inboard next to the transaxle and fed by ducts under the nose. Front-to-rear pressure balance is self-adjusting according to the load in the back, so under hard braking the entire car squats evenly instead of diving. Popular Science recorded the shortest stopping distance of any car it had tested. It is a 1970 French coupé and it out-stops a 1970 anything.

Six headlamps, two of which turn

Behind a single flush glass panel: six replaceable-bulb quartz-halogen Cibié units, self-leveling against the suspension, with the inner high beams swiveling with the steering to light the corner you are about to enter rather than the hedge you have already passed. In America this was illegal — federal rules demanded two or four round sealed beams, exposed, fixed. US cars got exactly that, and the front of the car never recovered.

Wheels made of glass fiber

For the rigours of African rallying, Michelin developed a resin wheel — Roues Résine — that weighed less than half the steel item and became a factory option. They are decades ahead of anything comparable.

And the small stuff, which is the best stuff

Rain-sensing wipers — in 1970 — that inferred water on the screen by measuring the current the wiper motor was drawing against the glass. A steering column adjustable for both height and reach. A hood scoop that feeds the ventilation system, not the engine, positioned in a neutral pressure zone so the cabin fan works identically at rest and at 130 mph. An aircraft-grade aluminum hood.

Section 05 — The shapeRobert Opron, and the argument about 0.26

Robert Opron designed it in-house, and I want to be careful here, because "designed" undersells what happened. Opron drew a car in which the aerodynamic requirement, the packaging requirement and the aesthetic requirement are the same requirement. The wide front track narrows toward the rear because that is what the airflow wants; the rear wheels are skirted because that is what the airflow wants; the tail is cut off flat in the Kamm manner because that is what the airflow wants. Seen from above it is a teardrop. Seen from the side it is a wedge that hasn't yet decided to be a wedge. Seen head-on, lit, in the dark, it is the single most intimidating thing to appear in a French rear-view mirror before or since.

Citroën claimed a drag coefficient of 0.26 at launch, which would have been extraordinary — a number the industry didn't reach in production until the Audi 100 of 1982. It later, quietly, published a revised figure of 0.339. Both numbers get repeated today, often in the same article. Take 0.339 as the real one and the SM is still slipperier than nearly everything it competed against, which tells you how bad the state of the art was.

Automobile Magazine put the SM eleventh on its 2005 list of the hundred coolest cars ever made. Eleventh feels low. Eleventh always feels low.

Section 06 — Driving itWhat it's actually like, and why that's hard to explain

Everything about an SM tells you it is going to be difficult, and then it isn't. That's the joke at the centre of the car.

You get in low. The seat is a proper bucket with a cushion built from individual rolls of foam, and it is better than the seat in your modern car. You start it and the Maserati clears its throat — a hard, thin, four-cam noise, more scalpel than sledgehammer, nothing like the Detroit V8 burble the shape of the car has led everyone in the parking lot to expect. The suspension rises. Not "settles." Rises, deliberately, over five or six seconds, like a plane retracting its gear in reverse, and every head within fifty meters turns.

Then you drive out of the space with two fingers, because the steering at parking speed is essentially frictionless, and you have your first genuine panic of ownership, because two turns lock to lock means the first roundabout arrives with more steering angle than you asked for. This is the 50-mile problem. It's real. Everybody who has driven an SM describes the same arc: half an hour of over-correcting, then a click, then an entirely new relationship with the idea of pointing a car.

Out on an open road it becomes the thing it was built to be. The engine is happier the harder you use it — 170 PS is not much, but it's 170 PS attached to almost no rotating inertia, and it pulls to seven thousand without ever sounding stressed. The shift action runs through that chromed gate with a mechanical precision that feels borrowed from a machine tool. The chassis doesn't roll so much as lean, once, and then hold. And the car is uncannily quiet at speed, because the shape is right and the suspension is doing all its arguing with the road somewhere you can't hear.

Journalists in period reported cruising at 200 km/h — 124 mph — for hours at a stretch, in comfort, on French roads that had no speed limit worth mentioning. With a 90-liter tank and genuinely decent economy, the range at that speed was long enough that the limiting factor was the driver's bladder rather than the fuel gauge. Motor Sport in 1972 put it best when it called the SM a nice car to be in at any speed — stationary to maximum, and everything in between.

Section 07 — The rivalsLosing on paper, winning at the pump

Line the SM up against what a wealthy person in 1972 was actually cross-shopping and a pattern appears immediately. It is the slowest thing here bar the Americans. It is also, by a country mile, the one you could afford to use.

Hold those two charts side by side and the SM's entire thesis appears. Every rival on that list buys its speed with displacement. The SM buys its speed with aerodynamics, weight and gearing — which is how you get a car that is 1.7 seconds slower to 60 than an E-Type and yet, in the real world, faster from Paris to Nice, because it stops for fuel half as often and its driver arrives capable of standing upright.

This becomes deliriously funny in 1973. When the oil crisis hits, the SM is the most economical car in its class in America. It is the correct car for the moment. And it dies anyway.

Section 08 — In the wildAround town, across a continent, and outside the Chinese Theater

Around town: 6/10

Two turns lock to lock and weightless parking assistance make it absurdly easy to place, and the ride flattens broken city surfaces better than anything sold today. Against that: it's 4.9 meters long, the rearward visibility is a letterbox, the Webers want to be warm before they want to be civil, and stop-start traffic is the single worst thing you can do to a four-cam Italian engine in a French car. Fine for a Saturday. Miserable as a commuter.

Long journeys: 10/10, and it isn't close

This is the entire reason the car exists. Ninety-liter tank, low drag, a suspension that erases the road, seats designed by people who understood that six hours is a long time, no torque steer, no wander, no fatigue. There is a specific and rare category of car that makes 500 miles feel like 200 — the Mercedes W126, the Citroën CX, the modern Audi A8 — and the SM invented the modern version of it.

A mountain road: 8/10

Genuinely good, provided you drive it as a fast tourer rather than a sports car. It carries speed beautifully and the brakes are absurd. What it won't do is talk to you about it. Some people find that hollow. Others find it liberating.

Outside a premiere: 11/10

Nothing else does the trick. A Ferrari announces money. A Rolls announces money and a driver. The SM pulls up, drops to its knees to let you out, and rises again as it leaves, and the crowd has no idea what they just watched. It's the only car that makes valets take photographs. It is worth remembering that this was, briefly, the official ceremonial transport of the French Republic — French presidents from Pompidou to Chirac toured Paris in SM présidentielles, and passengers over the years included Queen Elizabeth II and Pope John Paul II. Whatever your event is, the SM has done a bigger one.

Section 09 — CompetitionMorocco, a breadvan, and 202 mph on salt

Here is the fact that reframes the whole car. The SM's first competitive outing was the 1971 Rallye du Maroc — 4,350 km from Rabat to Casablanca over three days and three nights, through the Khemisset ford, the snow at Imilchil and the dust of the southern pistes, in what competitors called the hardest running of the event anyone could remember.

Fifty-nine crews started. Nine finished.

The winner was the near-standard SM of Jean Deschazeaux and Jean Plassard, over an hour ahead of second place. A front-wheel-drive luxury coupé with hydropneumatic suspension and a Maserati engine won the most brutal rally on the calendar on its debut, and it did it by a margin normally reserved for typographical errors.

Citroën kept at it, and the works cars got progressively less recognizable, culminating in a short-wheelbase, square-tailed "breadvan" prototype with a heavily tuned engine — the SM's competition department having concluded, correctly, that the elegant tail was doing nothing for a car spending its life sideways on gravel. Those Michelin resin wheels came from precisely this program.

The other competition story is Californian. SM World in Los Angeles — the marque's great American specialist — built a twin-turbo SM that in 1987 set a class production-car land speed record at Bonneville at 325 km/h. That's 202 mph. In a 1970s French front-wheel-drive coupé, on salt, with the ghosts of the Citroën board watching.

Section 10 — The buyersDictators, drummers, and the man who wrote the Jaws theme

Every car has an owner profile. The SM's reads like a hostage negotiation.

Heads of state: Leonid Brezhnev, who had one. Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. The Shah of Iran. Idi Amin, who had seven, because of course he did. The two Chapron-built présidentielle convertibles served the French Republic for thirty-seven years and retired with roughly 25,000 km on them, which is what happens when your daily commute is a parade at walking pace.

Musicians: Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, independently, from the same band. Adam Clayton of U2. Carlos Santana. Guy Berryman of Coldplay, still. Composers John Williams and John Barry — which means the men responsible for Star Wars and for James Bond both looked at the available luxury coupés of the era and picked the weird French one.

Actors and athletes: Lorne Greene, Lee Majors, Johan Cruyff, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, the motorcycle god Mike Hailwood. Graham Greene, the novelist. Jay Leno, whose SM sits in the background of half the videos on his channel.

Section 11 — The fallFour causes, one popular myth

The received explanation is the 1973 oil crisis. The received explanation is mostly wrong, and the numbers say so.

Cause one: it broke, and then it needed two specialists

Three Weber carburetors demand constant fettling. The timing chains need manual adjustment, in an interference engine, and a great many owners did not know that — with the result that engines let go at around 60,000 km. The 90-degree V6 layout was unfamiliar to virtually every mechanic alive; only Buick and Jeep had built anything similar. The ignition breaker cassettes were unreliable. All of this is fixable, and all of it has been fixed in the decades since. None of it was fixed in 1972.

Worse: to keep an SM right you needed a Citroën hydraulics specialist and a Maserati engine specialist. In France the first was on every other corner and the second essentially did not exist. In America neither existed. Once word of this got around the cocktail circuit — and it got around fast — the order book collapsed.

Cause two: America closed the door

For 1974 the NHTSA required 5-mph impact bumpers. The SM's variable-height hydropneumatic suspension made compliance flatly impossible: the car's ride height is a variable, and the regulation assumed it was a constant. Citroën expected an exemption. Citroën did not get an exemption. The 134 US-market 1974 cars already built could not legally be sold to Americans and were shipped to Japan instead. The SM's largest export market vanished by administrative memo.

Cause three: the parent company died

Citroën went bankrupt in 1974 — the Wankel program, the SM program and the Maserati purchase between them having burned through a great deal more money than the company had. Peugeot took over, divested Maserati in May 1975, and canceled the SM immediately. With production down to 115 cars, it wasn't a hard call.

Cause four: the factory itself closed

The Quai André-Citroën works on the Seine shut in 1974. The last 135 SMs were assembled by Ligier at Vichy — the racing constructor, in a different town, under a different owner. A car conceived as the flagship of French industry ended its life being hand-built in a subcontractor's shop.

As for the oil crisis: plenty of thirstier cars launched into exactly that market and did fine. Mercedes introduced the 450SEL 6.9 — with hydropneumatic suspension, no less. Peugeot itself launched the V6 604 in 1975. The SM did not die of fuel prices. It died of complexity, timing, and a bumper regulation.

Section 12 — The inheritanceEverything it left behind

Failed cars are usually failures. The SM is an exception: almost every part of it went on to a longer and more successful life than the car itself.

Note the last row especially. The CX sold roughly a hundred times as many units as the SM and was, functionally, the SM's argument translated into a language the market could read. Citroën did not waste the money. It just paid for the CX with the SM, which is an expensive way to fund a development program but not a stupid one.

And the coachbuilt oddities

Henri Chapron built two présidentielle four-door convertibles for the French state — stretched 52 cm to 5.60 meters overall, with special low gearing and extra cooling so they could parade at 6–7 km/h all day, plus a rearward-facing drop-down seat for a translator and a hydraulically actuated electric roof. He also built five Mylord cabriolets and seven Opéra sedans. A Mylord sold at auction in February 2014 for €548,320 — roughly $754,000 at the time, and roughly twenty times what a coupé was worth.

Heuliez built two pillarless targa SM Espaces in 1971. Frua showed a concept that looked uncannily like a Merak. Three RHD prototypes were built in Hertfordshire by a Citroën dealer; twelve more were converted in Melbourne. The factory never authorized a convertible — Citroën considered the welded-on roof and rear quarters structural — which has not stopped people from making their own ever since.

And in spring 1974, Maserati dropped a 4.0-liter V8 making 260 hp into a standard SM and tested it for 12,000 km. It required, reportedly, only modest changes, and it turned the SM into the genuinely quick car it always deserved to be. Alejandro de Tomaso had the car destroyed. The engine survived; the SM Club de France built an exact replica around it and showed it at Rétromobile in 2010. If you want a one-sentence summary of this company's entire history, that's the one.

Section 13 — The marketWhat one costs, and why you'd buy it over the obvious things

Here is where the story turns, because the SM's punishment in period is your discount now.

Read that spread carefully, because it's the single most important thing on this page. A running, presentable, sorted SM is $30,000–$45,000. A cheap one is $18,000. A perfect one is $95,000. The distance between the bottom and the top of that range is far larger than the cost of fixing the bottom car — which means the cheap SM is not cheap. It is a $30,000 car with a $40,000 invoice attached, and the invoice is non-negotiable, because the hydraulics do not care about your budget and the four-cam Maserati V6 has never once been talked down.

Why this and not something else

For SM money, the obvious alternatives are a decent 911SC, a Series III E-Type in need of nothing, a Mercedes R107, a nice Jensen. All good cars. All cars where you will meet someone who owns the same one at every single event you attend for the rest of your life.

The case for the SM is fourfold. It is rarer: 12,920 built against 72,500 E-Types. It is more advanced, not for its era but flatly — a 1972 SM has speed-sensitive steering, self-leveling suspension, cornering lights and rain-sensing wipers, and your neighbor's new crossover has the same four features and treats them as a selling point. It is better at the job a classic GT is actually asked to do, which is to cover distance in a way that makes the journey the point. And it is currently cheap in a soft market, which is the only time anyone sensible has ever bought anything.

The case against is equally honest, and I'd rather you heard it here: it's slow by modern standards, the running costs are Italian rather than French, the specialist network is thin outside Europe and California, and if you buy the wrong one it will hurt you in ways a Porsche cannot. This is not a starter classic. It is a second or third classic, bought by someone who already knows what they're doing and has decided to spend that knowledge on something interesting.

ReferenceThe numbers, all in one place

Sources: period road tests from Motor Trend (Feb 1972, Feb 1974), Car and Driver (Jun 1972), Popular Science (Dec 1973), Motor Sport (Dec 1972), CAR (Dec 1979) and Collectible Automobile (Jun 2001); Jeff Daniels, Citroën SM, Osprey Autohistory, 1981; Maurizio Tabucchi, Maserati: The Grand Prix, Sports and GT Cars, 2003; Rallye du Maroc 1971 results via Club Citroën France and eWRC; market data from CLASSIC.COM and the Hagerty Price Guide, current as of July 2026.