Citroën Axel la cousine de Craiova

After "Citroën Visa - voiture sans frontière", Dutch author Thijs van der Zanden has published a new book about the Citroën Axel, probably one of the most underestimated models of this iconic French brand.
This book describes why Citroën decided to make the Axel, it talks about the design process and the introduction - first named Oltcit, later known as Axel. Van der Zanden explores the evolution of the car including all technical data and chassis numbers. There is an overview of colours and trims, production and sales figures and of course there is room for personal memories of retired Citroën and Oltcit workers.
Although written in Dutch, countless illustrations (often never published before) make this book a must-have for the non-Dutch speaking Citroën fan too.

For Citroën the Axel was a disaster. Due to dreadful production in Romania during the time of the dictator Ceausescu, brand-new cars broke down, leaked oil, lost components, consumed way too much fuel, and even caught fire. Historically speaking however, the Axel is very interesting. It is the very last car from the period that tyre manufacturer Michelin was in charge at Citroën, the last design without the influence of Peugeot, which took over Citroën afterwards. Moreover the Axel holds a very long and interesting development history, which has not only been influenced by the takeover of Citroën by Peugeot, but is also full of political plots and espionage between East and West.
 
In this book Thijs van der Zanden tells the story of the Axel with numerous facts, interesting anecdotes and a lot of photographs. Van der Zanden interviewed retired Citroën employees and other people involved at the Axel project, who came up with interesting tales and inside knowledge, like the former head of the Rumanian secret service, who explained that almost ninety per cent of the Rumanian employees were in reality spies with orders to steal Western technology…
 
Overviews with technical data, chassis numbers, colours, pricelists, production numbers and sales figures make the book even more interesting. The text has been largely illustrated with over five hundred images, most of them never published before. 

To purchase, send an e-mail with your name, address and the number of copies you would like to reserve, to info@citrovisie.nl

© 2013 Julian Marsh