DOES IT WORK?
Hydropneumatic? Nope. DS uses modern tech to get some of that classic ride quality back.
It wasn’t the first Citroën to get Hydropneu-matic suspension, but the classic DS of 1955 brought the innovative system to the world’s attention. So it’s appropriate a suspension system that’s arguably its spiritual heir is being used across most of the line-up of Cit-roën spin-off brand DS.
Whereas the Hydropneumatic system combined hydraulics and pneumatics, often with ride-height adjustment and self-level-ling capability, today’s DS is going big on Active Scan Suspension.
The idea of Active Scan Suspension is simple, even if the execution is not, involv-ing considerable processing power. It reads the road ahead to pre-emptively prepare for the worst ruts and biggest undulations.
Key to the technology is a camera built into the top of the windscreen, plus four height sensors and three accelerometers, to gauge steering angle, speed and braking. The camera scans the road (between five and 25 metres ahead), and prepares the wheels for upcoming lumps and bumps. It’s active between 9 and 81mph. Cars with Ac-tive Scan Suspension have an additional drive mode, Comfort.
It’s available on three out of four of the DS model range: the 4, 7 and 9. On the 4 and 7, it’s confined to the top-spec Opera version; with the 9, it’s standard on every car.
Opt for Active Scan Suspension on the DS 4 – the cheapest way to get the tech on a new car – and you instantly set your hatchback apart from the many other Stellantis prod-ucts using the EMP2 platform.
We tested an Active Scan Suspen-sion-equipped DS 4 back-to-back with our long-term test DS 4, which doesn’t have it, and we found that it’s generally softer. Over an identical road loop that included urban streets, fast motorway stretches and twisty country roa
