Herringbone

Look at a Ferrari badge and you are looking at a myth. A horse, borrowed from a dead fighter pilot, on a yellow field borrowed from a city. Look at a Lamborghini and you get a bull. Peugeot, a lion. Alfa Romeo, a serpent eating what appears to be a person, which we will get to another day.

Now look at a Citroën. Two arrows, pointing up, stacked.

For years I filed this under disappointing. Here is a company that gave the world the Traction Avant, the 2CV, the DS and the SM — arguably the four most imaginative cars any single manufacturer has ever produced — and its badge looks like a road sign for a steep grade. No animal. No crest. No mythology. Just two chevrons doing nothing in particular.

That was wrong, and the reality is far better. Those are not arrows. They are teeth.

Part onePoland, 1900

Before André Citroën was a car manufacturer he was an industrialist, and before he was an industrialist he was a young engineer on a trip.

Around 1900, traveling in Poland — his mother's family was Polish — he came across a piece of milling machinery driven by wooden gears cut in a chevron pattern. Not straight teeth. Not simply angled teeth. Teeth cut in a repeating V, mirrored down the middle of the gear.

The pattern is called herringbone, because seen from above it looks like the bones of a herring. And in a water-driven mill, the difference it made was immediately obvious: the gears ran quietly, they ran smoothly, and — critically for a gear made of wood — they carried heavy loads without tearing themselves apart.

Citroën bought the rights.

He went home and founded Société Anonyme des Engrenages Citroën — the Citroën Gear Company — and built a business manufacturing double-helical gears in steel. That business, not cars, is what made him.

Part twoWhy the shape matters

To understand the badge you have to understand the problem the shape solves, and it is a genuinely elegant piece of engineering.

The problem with straight teeth

A spur gear — plain straight teeth, parallel to the shaft — is the simplest gear there is, and it has one bad habit. Each tooth engages along its whole length simultaneously. Contact is instant and total, which means every single tooth engagement is a small impact. Multiply that by a few thousand rpm and you get noise, vibration and wear.

The fix, and the new problem it creates

Cut the teeth at an angle instead and the contact begins at one edge and rolls smoothly across the face. More teeth are in mesh at any moment, the load is spread, and the gear runs dramatically quieter. This is a helical gear, and it is why your car's transmission does not sound like a milk float.

But angled teeth push sideways. The same slant that makes the contact roll also generates a force along the shaft — axial thrust — that tries to shove the entire gear out of the gearbox. You now need thrust bearings to absorb a load your gear is creating purely as a side effect of being quiet.

The fix for the fix

Cut two sets of helical teeth on the same gear, angled in opposite directions, meeting in the middle.

Now each half generates thrust — and each half's thrust points at the other. They cancel. You get the smooth, quiet, load-spreading engagement of a helical gear with none of the sideways force. Net axial load: zero.

That is a herringbone gear. That is the pattern André Citroën saw in a Polish mill. And two of those mirrored teeth, stacked, is the badge on the nose of every Citroën ever built.

The catch is that last column. Herringbone gears are difficult and expensive to cut accurately — the two helices have to be near-perfectly matched or the gear fights itself. That difficulty is precisely why owning the patent was worth something, and why a young engineer who bought the rights ended up with a factory.

Part three1919: the trophy goes on the car

When André Citroën launched Automobiles Citroën in 1919 with the Type A — Europe's first mass-produced car — he needed a mark. He already had one.

The earliest badge put the double chevron in yellow inside an oval, over blue, with "A. Citroën" beneath. And the choice says something specific. He was not claiming speed, or nobility, or aristocratic lineage. He was pointing at his own first success and saying: before I built cars, I built the gears that made other machines work better. This company comes out of engineering.

It is worth sitting with how unusual that is. Ferrari's horse arrived via a dead aviator and a grieving countess. Porsche's crest is medieval heraldry. Maserati's trident belongs to a sea god. Mercedes' star is a claim on land, sea and air.

Citroën's badge is a machine part. It was not dreamed up to express anything. It was already sitting in the factory, cut in steel, doing a job.

Part fourThe man who lit the Eiffel Tower

None of which should suggest André Citroën was a modest engineer quietly minding his lathes. He was one of the great showmen in industrial history.

He organized motorized expeditions across the Sahara and Central Asia. He paid for road signs across France, with his name on them. He handed out toy Citroëns to children on the theory that they would grow into customers. And from 1925 to 1934 he rented the Eiffel Tower and spelled CITROËN down its side in roughly a quarter of a million light bulbs — at the time the largest advertisement on earth, visible for tens of miles.

Part fiveWhy it suits the company so well

Here is the part that makes the badge more than trivia.

A herringbone gear is not a brute-force solution. It is a clever one. Somebody looked at a well-understood problem — gears are noisy — solved it with an angle, noticed the angle created a second problem, and solved that by mirroring the first solution against itself. It is a fix nested inside a fix, and the result is quieter, stronger and more elegant than the thing it replaced.

Now consider the company. Front-wheel drive and monocoque construction made mainstream by the Traction Avant. The 2CV, which turned radical simplicity into an engineering position. The DS, with hydropneumatic suspension that self-levels, self-adjusts and rides better than most cars built since. The SM, which answered the problem of torque steer not by reducing feedback but by abolishing it, and put six self-leveling headlamps behind glass while it was at it.

Every one of those is the same move as the gear. Look at a normal problem. Refuse the normal answer. Solve it sideways, and accept the extra complexity as the price of doing it properly.

Part sixClosing the loop

In 2022 Citroën introduced a new identity — by the company's count, the tenth major revision of the mark since 1919. The chevrons got wider and more prominent, and they were set back inside a vertical oval frame. The reference is explicit: it is the 1919 badge, redrawn. Citroën's own designers described the intent as closing the loop and returning to André Citroën's first logo.

A century of revisions, and the answer was the thing he started with.

Which is fitting, because unlike a horse or a bull or a trident, the chevrons were never a metaphor that could go out of fashion. They are a description of a real object that still exists, still works, and is still the best way to transmit serious power quietly. Herringbone gears turn in ship drivetrains, turbine reduction boxes and industrial mills right now, doing exactly what they did in that Polish mill in 1900.

The badge did not need modernizing. It just needed reading.

Sources: Citroën Origins on the origin of the Citroën logo; Stellantis Media on the 2022 brand identity; standard mechanical engineering references on spur, helical and double-helical gearing; Citroën and Michelin corporate histories for the 1934 receivership. Current as of July 2026.