Get in and drive off: What was taken for granted for decades is no longer so simple for many city dwellers today.
Parking spaces are scarce, traffic is increasing - in many places you are no longer really mobile by car.
Citroën boss Vincent Cobée expects things to get worse.
If cities continue to grow, as predicted by the World Bank, and if two thirds of humanity will live in them by 2050, driving a car in the city will become so expensive that hardly anyone can afford it.
Or it will be banned completely.
"In almost 300 cities around the world, more or less concrete discussions are currently being held about banning cars from the city center," says Jan Burgard of the Berylls strategy consultant.
According to Cobée, society learned during the pandemic that buses and trains are not the only solution.
If Cobée has its way, the car still has a chance in cities.
"We therefore looked for a way of how city dwellers could remain individually mobile even in times when the car is no longer affordable or desirable - and found the solution in Urban Collectif."
This is what the French call a mobility system with autonomous and, of course, electric vehicles.
They bring people or goods from A to B, but should be able to do even more.
Because people spend more time on the move, it should be used sensibly - productively, for entertainment or for relaxation.
Only the idea and the technical foundation come from Citroën - a platform measuring 1.60 by 2.60 meters.
In addition to batteries and drive, it contains the technology for autonomous driving developed by the Google-related company Waymo.
At first glance, the wagons look like industrial trucks.
The difference is made by the Citroën logos, which light up to indicate the direction of travel.
Red means the vehicle drives away from the viewer, while white means it comes towards him.
The drive is integrated into the tires.
Goodyear has developed profiled rubber balls for the concept, the size of medicine balls, which can be rotated in all directions.
This mobile pedestal (“skate”) moves forwards, backwards or sideways, can rotate on the spot and maneuver in gaps.
But also under the superstructures, so-called pods. They can be booked via mobile phone and then docked to the skates. These cabins are supposed to be provided by other companies, says Cobée - he has a kind of open source approach in mind. It's a little like with apps from second-party providers that run on a smartphone. The Citroën man shows food trucks and barista mobiles, office containers, workshop or courier vehicles, yoga studios and hairdressing salons on sketches. Thoughts are free, what becomes of them is naturally unclear.
After all, three of the partners have set up such pods for an initial demonstration.
A kind of mobile hotel suite with lounge furniture and champagne in the minibar, a fitness capsule with an ergometer and rowing machine for working out on the way between office and apartment and a kind of bus stop that has itself become a bus buzzed through a trade fair hall in Paris , and should commute on busy promenades.
The idea is not entirely new.
Such approaches are particularly common in the commercial vehicle world: from containers or swap bodies on conventional trucks to visions such as the Rinspeed Snap On or the Mercedes Urbanetic.
So far, however, no car manufacturer has tried such a concept and no one has brought in other operators.
Cobée is convinced that this approach only works in conjunction with one another that will produce many attractive offers and save costs - even if a skate might initially cost many hundreds of thousands of euros.
Top speed of 25 km / h
At the same time, the system potentially extends the useful life of the trolleys.
“While normal cars stand around uselessly 90 percent of the time, the skate is on the move day and night except for the four hours for charging,” says Cobée, extrapolating the utility value - while subtracting the costs.
The fact that the vehicles should initially travel at a maximum of 25 km / h should actually limit the development effort - and in a city like Paris with almost 30 km / h across the board, it wouldn't be so bad either.
Own lanes, as desired by Citroën, also reduce the requirements for the autopilot.
It all sounds hip and for the future, but Cobée knows that many drivers consider such concepts to be unrealistic.
And yes, there are various technical hurdles.
The spherical wheels with integrated motors are just dummies.
The skates can neither charge inductively as promised, nor does the autopilot maneuver really smoothly.
Weird ideas are good for your image
"And without the city administrations, the transport companies and of course without partners who build the appropriate pods and thus offer the necessary experiences, we have no chance anyway." That is why Cobée does not even seriously hope that in ten years' time autonomous fitness studios or hairdressing salons will be buzzing through Paris, Berlin or Beijing. He would be happy if there were three or four different variants for people, parcels and other goods.
"But not trying is not a solution either," says the Citroën boss. He knows that in the end, at least the message of Citroën as a particularly creative brand will stick. This is a reputation that the French established with the legendary DS and have maintained since then - most recently with the Ami microcar. Simply putting ideas into the world without them resulting in anything would disturb the clientele.
The Urban Collectif scenario is not entirely unrealistic: city dwellers would have to get used to the sight of robo-shuttles within the next ten years, believes mobility expert Wolfgang Bernhart from the management consultancy Roland Berger.
He sees huge fleets of such autonomous vehicles rolling in.
"A new generation of means of transport is approaching us, which will lead to a new type of individual mobility," says Bernhart.
It's like switching from the cab to the car over 100 years ago.
Although the triumphant advance of these shuttles will probably only begin in Asia and America, they will also determine the cityscape in Europe in the medium term.
"And there will be cities in which people will no longer drive any other way," he is convinced.
Hardly anyone will then have their own car and maybe not even a driver's license - but just get in and drive off, that should work again.
Thomas Geiger is a freelance author and was supported in his research by Citroën. Reporting is independent of this.