Citroen C3 Pluriel Charleston Car Review

Facts At A Glance
Car: Citroen C3 Pluriel Charleston
Prices: £15,795 - on the road
Insurance Group: 4
Emissions: 160g/km
Performance: [1.4 petrol] 0-60 13.9s Top Speed 99mph
Fuel Consumption: [1.4 petrol] (urban) 31mpg / (extra urban) 52mpg / (combined) 41.5mpg
Safety: Twin front and side airbags, ABS with EBA and EBD
Dimensions: Length/Width/Height 3934/1700/1559mm

DOING THE CHARLESTON

Our Rating: 5.9 / 10

Odd isn’t the word for the C3 Pluriel Charleston. Steve Walker reports on a very Gallic open-topped Citroen

The Citroen C3 Pluriel is a strange contraption at the best of times but in Charleston special edition guise, it’s slightly madder. Echoing Citroen’s classic 2CV Charleston with a bold two-tone colour scheme, this is a car with will confuse most customers but some will probably still be seduced by its unique character and the inevitable Citroen discounting.

You don’t have to be mad to drive one but it helps. Citroen’s C3 Pluriel is the car that serves as a ready-made retort to anyone who claims that the French manufacturer has lost the wilful quirkiness that characterised some of its most famous products down the years. It’s doubtful whether the Pluriel will be lauded as a design classic by future generations but you can’t deny that it’s unlike anything else on the road and it’s a very cheap way to obtain a four-seat convertible. The car is now available in special edition Charleston guise, a car that echoes that true Citroen classic, the 2CV, which was also offered in Charleston guise.

Legend has it that the Citroen 2CV was designed to transport a box of eggs safely across a ploughed field. It’s difficult to say exactly what the C3 Pluriel was designed for but when you look at its idiosyncratic roof arrangement and multiple body configurations, it was probably something even more eccentric. The 2CV Charleston was a special edition model with a curved coachline running along its flanks to mimic the car’s domed roof and the C3 Pluriel Charleston inherits the same look.

Offered only with the C3 Pluriel’s entry-level 1.4-litre 75bhp petrol engine, the Charleston model isn’t particularly lively on the road. The 0-60mph sprint takes 13.9s and you’ll eventually edge up to a 99mph top speed with real perseverance. The driving position is unusual due to the fact you sit ducked into the car with the curved windscreen apparently soaring overhead. There’s not a lot of feel from the steering, but the Pluriel never really pretends to be a performance car.

The C3 Pluriel is always an experience, but is it one you’d want to repeat? Even with the black roof ‘tusks’ in place, it feels very airy when the central canvas roof is retracted, the side windows are dropped and the back glass is slotted out of sight. Rear seat passengers will have just as much fun as front seat occupants and they’ll also feel reassured by the Pluriel’s high waistline. It handles fairly neatly, the comfort-oriented suspension doing a good job of soaking up most surface imperfections. Citroen’s engineers are proud of the reinforcing work they’ve done on the Pluriel and the fact that it weighs about 150kg more than its hatchback equivalent is testament to this effort. Over the very worst potholes, you’ll provoke a shudder from the chassis and creaks from the body work.

Charleston customers get a C3 Pluriel that looks quite different from the standard cars with a bowed coachline running from the top of the boot opening down to brush the door sills then up again to end at the point of the headlight clusters. Above the line, the body is red and below it’s black. The key drawback of the Pluriel’s design is that the bulky roof rails cannot be stored in the car upon removal, instead residing in their holder in your garage. Therefore you don’t have the option of pulling over to the roadside and dropping the roof to form a full convertible as you can in a Peugeot 207CC. Once you have left the rails at home, you’re committed to open top motoring for the day, come rain or shine. One suspects we won’t see too many Pluriel Charleston models plying our roads in full convertible mode.

There’s a reasonable amount of space in the back for two, although three would be a tight squeeze as both knee room and shoulder space would be at a premium. Some of you may have spotted that the rear screen folds into the spare wheel well, thus signifying a lack of said wheel. Rather than rely on the commonplace - and usually quite useless - puncture repair aerosol, Citroen has d