Sahara / 4X4

So, what did Citroën hope for when the company launched the radical Sahara to the market? What were they trying to achieve and who did they think would buy the car?

By the mid 1950s, the 2CV was already known as a rugged car, its original customers often bought their first 2CV to replace a horse and cart. It was never aimed at customers looking for beauty or speed. It had been designed for rough use by people who needed a workhorse, rather than elegant transport.

The car had already proved its worth in extreme climates. The famous adventurer, Jacques Cornet, had taken examples as far afield as South America and Asia. He was to be followed a few years later by Baudot and Seguela who drove their 2CV AZLP Type PO around the world; the first French car to achieve this feat.

However, although the basic model 2CV was rugged, the off-road potential of its chassis and suspension could never be exploited by its tiny 425cc 12.5 bhp engine, let alone the 375cc engine still available. Those engines certainly couldn’t power a four-wheel drive arrangement: the drag of a prop shaft running the length of the car, together with all the paraphernalia connected with the four-wheel drive, would sap what little power there was; the humble 425cc flat-twin had little enough to spare.

However, thinking laterally (although with hindsight, perhaps a little too far off beam) Citroën’s designers took a long hard look at the ample space in the boot and decided that a second engine was the answer. The Sahara was born, or at least, conceived.

The project was handled by Citroën’s commercial (i.e. mainly dealing with lorries and vans such as the H-van) department. Their focus was strictly on commercial customers and the development and marketing (what little there was) was all focused upon that market, rather than the personal transport market. In hindsight, this may have been short-sighted, but at the time there was probably very little interest among private customers for a full-on 4x4 vehicle with little sophistication and no luggage space.

The Sahara was unveiled in November 1958 at the Service Vehicles Motor Show. Its main customers were predicted to come from the oil exploration market. The car underwent a number of minor modifications and occasional appearances at motor shows until production proper began in December 1960.

Having launched the Sahara, very little was done to alter its design during its lifespan. Perhaps the management at Citroën soon realised that it wasn’t going to set the world alight in terms of sales and so, it was left well alone. For example, when the ‘normal’ 2CV received a facelift for 1960, the Sahara retained the same bonnet it always had, although, it did get the ‘benefit’ of the safer, but more difficult to use, front-hinged doors the normal model had been given.

Two 425cc engines, each producing 12 bhp, later uprated to a whole 13.5 bhp! This equated to 5CV on the French "cheval-vapeur" taxation system. Economy was 28 - 35 miles per gallon depending upon the terrain.

The rear engine and gearbox were ‘almost’ a copy of the front, but facing backwards. There were one or two important differences, (for example, the hydraulic clutch assembly, which was unique to the Sahara models) which makes tracking down spares extremely difficult for owners and restorers. Also, the gearbox crown wheel was reversed, effectively providing four reverse gears; however, as the engine was mounted facing the rear, the result was still four forward and one reverse gear.

The Sahara’s light weight (650kg dry weight) and excellent weight distribution gave it superb climbing ability for its power output.

Either engine could, in an emergency, run on its own, although the car was designed to run on the front one alone or both (only the front engine charged the batteries).

The engines were not linked or synchronised, but had a shared accelerator pedal and a single, floor mounted gear lever. There was a single clutch pedal too, although this was linked to two independent, hydraulically-operated clutches.

To compensate for the car’s higher fuel consumption, there were two fuel tanks, located under the two front seats and filled through holes in each of the front doors.

There was no room for the spare wheel in the boot, so it was kept in a recess on the front bonnet. Even when the ‘ordinary’ 2CV received an updated bonnet design, the Sahara kept the old-style ripple bonnet, although it had the ripples removed from the beginning.

Other obvious differences were the rear wings, which were cut away at the bottom edge to allow more ground clearance, PO (pays de outre mer or “overseas”) bumpers were fitted and the rear quarter panels had louvres for increased air flow round the rear engine, to aid cooling.

At the rear of the car, the rear engine cover was a modified bootlid, with a round hole cut out for air to be pulled in by the rear engine’s cooling fan. Tyres were 155x400, by Michelin of course.

As usual with Citroën, the Sahara was produced at different plants, in France, Belgium (50 cars manufactured at Le Forest factory) and Spain (85 cars manufactured at the Virgo factory between 1964 and 1966.

The benefits of having a second engine in the boot were multiple. Weight distribution was very even; a real advantage on soft ground and also (although merely a by-product) on tarmac. The car could be driven on one ‘economical’ engine, while only two-wheel drive was needed and, in difficulties, either engine could be used, even to bump-start the other.

On the other hand, taking up so much valuable space with another complete engine, gearbox and ancillaries seriously handicapped the car’s other capabilities. There simply wasn’t any boot space available for storage and passengers were assailed by the noise of the rear engine with very little soundproofing. Still, they probably couldn’t hear the massively increased wind noise when the car was rattling along at full-tilt on the open road at speeds the single-engined car wouldn’t be able to manage until its engine has been massively increased (relatively speaking) another decade later.

The name “Sahara” was dropped in 1962 when France withdrew from Algeria, following a bloody period of civil unrest, bombing and attempted coup-d’états. After then, the car was referred to as a “2CV 4x4”.

So why did the Sahara fail? There seems to be a number of reasons.

First, cost. Although the Sahara wasn’t an expensive car compared with the heavyweight all-wheel drive competitors, it was significantly more expensive then the base model 2CV, which limited its appeal only to those who had a real business need for it, rather than those who might need 4x4 go-anywhere capabilities every now and then.

Second, although the off-road performance was extremely good, sacrificing all the storage capacity in the boot meant that the inside of the car had to be used for storage, encroaching upon passenger space. While not a problem when the car was carrying only two people, if it was carrying four people, any luggage could only be carried on their laps! Given the car was aimed at the oil exploration market, and would need to carry engineers and their equipment, this was a serious handicap.

Third, the car’s promotion and marketing came under the control of Citroën’s commercial department, not the department responsible for private cars. More used to heavy goods vehicles, the department perhaps under-estimated the appeal of the car to potential car-owning customers who might have been attracted to an all-wheel drive version of an already-proven tough car!

Today the Sahara is something of a holy grail among 2CV enthusiasts and collectors. Strangely enough, probably a higher proportion of them are known to exist than perhaps any other A-series model. In total, 694 models were produced and around 50 are thought to still exist; that’s over seven per cent. If a similar number of 2CV’s produced during the same time as the Sahara was produced still existed, we’d have nearly 130,000 still on the roads!

NB. A word about ‘4x4’. The term is from military terminology, where the first number refers to the number of wheels and the second to the number of these wheels that are driven. In other words, an ordinary 2CV is a 4x2, a motorbike would be a 2x1, while larger vehicles could be anything from a 6x2 to an 8x8. The term “AWD” is sometimes used to mean “all wheel drive”, while “2WD” is of course, two-wheel drive. Some 2CVs are resplendent in stickers declaring them, against all the evidence, to be two-wheel drive motorbikes (“2x2”), or even more bizarrely, that they have only two wheels, but four of them are driven (“2x4”)!