The Citroën 2CV Sahara 4x4 Was Just Crazy Enough to Work (2024)

This is part of a feature we call Autoweek Breaks Down, where we bring you a smattering of stories tied to a weekly theme. The aim is to deliver automotive content that entertains and enlightens but that doesn’t necessarily follow the news cycle. This week Autoweek Breaks Down Madness.

The Citroën 2CV is an almost poetically simple car. Conceived before WWII and put into production in its wake, it was meant to get rural France on the road; as we recently explored, it featured a flat-two engine that powered the front wheels via a four-speed manual transmission. It is both robust and elegant in a way that few other mass-produced vehicles are.

And in that light, the the Citroën 2CV Safari, its rare 4x4 variant built between 1958 and 1971, seems like needless complication—an insanely convoluted way to add two more driven wheels to the straightforward 2CV. That’s because Citroën's engineers added 4x4 functionality in a way that can only be described as highly lateral: It installed an extra engine in the back.

The French have always done things a little differently; I think this is because France developed an independent auto industry very early, and that industry followed its own unique evolutionary paths. The results were sometimes very forward-looking (the now-common front-engine, front-wheel drive, for example) and sometimes just plain weird. But as some English guy once said of that country across the Channel’s automakers, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

Consider the typical approach to four-wheel drive. There’s only one engine, obviously, and it sends power through a transmission to a transfer case. The transfer case then pushes that power to the driven axles. There are many benefits to a transfer case; often, such a setup allows drivers to select between two- and four-wheel drive, which is convenient for a vehicle that is designed for off-road and highway use. A transfer case can also function as a transmission of sorts, adding extra low-range gears for heavy-duty crawling.

Though it is generally accepted as the “normal” way of doing things, this route adds complexity as well. Automakers looking to incorporate a transfer case-based 4x4 system must either invent that system or procure one from a supplier (see GM’s relationship with NAPCO). If a vehicle isn’t designed to accommodate multiple driven axles from the get-go—and the Citroën 2CV was not—there’s the matter of routing drive shafts where drive shafts were never meant to be. In Citroën’s case, this would have necessitated lifting the 2CV or sacrificing space in the flat-floored cabin.

If Citroën was planning a big push into the off-road vehicle segment in the early 1960s, perhaps the investment in a conventional four-wheel-drive system (and a vehicle built around it) would have made sense; indeed, it would later take that course with somewhat more successful 4x4 versions of the Méhari. In this modern era, though, with four-wheel drive (and all-wheel drive) commonly offered on all sorts of vehicles, we forget that it simply wasn’t that common when the Sahara debuted. 4x4 vehicles were niche offerings purchased by people who needed them to do specific things, like patrolling the deserts of northern Africa—Algeria was a French colony until 1962, remember.

And with that in mind, two engines were the most expedient, logical way forward for what Citroën knew was going to be a low-volume vehicle.

You can watch a Sahara in action in this nicely shot video, which is not in English. Some, like the subject car here, seem to lack the hood-mounted tire (which helps give it a tough look):

In this case, both engines operate totally independently; they even have separate fuel tanks. Use the front engine, and the Sahara functions like a conventional FWD 2CV. Top speed is apparently around 35 mph. Kick on the rear, and you’ve got four-wheel drive—and a top speed of 60 mph, which should sound terrifying if you’ve ever been in a 2CV. Because the 2CV weighs about as much as a medium-sized wheel of brie and has a compact footprint, these 4x4 Saharas reportedly possessed goatlike agility off-road.

And the twin-engine motor did offer one additional benefit: Redundancy. If one motor broke, you could limp home on the other. Handy, if you’re roaming across an African desert.

According to the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, which has a 1962 Sahara in its eclectic collection, just 694 Saharas were produced. Only 100 or so are believed to survive, which makes it one of the rarer 2CV variants out there.

If you needed further proof that this approach to four-wheel propulsion wasn’t totally crazy, take a look at a modern electric car. From a Tesla to a Porsche Taycan to a Bollinger, all-wheel drive typically means separate (albeit digitally linked) drive units: one in the front, one or sometimes two in the back. Some automakers have considered going even further, using one motor per wheel. The concept is the same as the Sahara, but the advent of electric motors has streamlined and simplified its implementation. It’s vindication, of a sort, for Team France.

I still think you’d have to be a special sort of nuts to max one of these thing out, though. Flying over Algerian sand dunes at 60 mph in a twin-engine Gallic tin can: Now that’s real madness.