You’re not the only ones thinking it. It’s true. Cars just aren’t very exciting anymore.

The occasional eyebrow-raising motor show concept model aside, the autos that actually make it onto our streets are increasingly inoffensive, boring, plastic clones, designed to be traded-in after two years on the road. No wonder there seem to be as many warnings about driver fatigue these days as there used to be about speeding.

To think that a car once captivated the world in a single day, the way the Citröen DS did at the 1955 Paris auto show. Think of the reception accorded the iPhone* after its announcement last week, and imagine a product maintaining that passionate response for the next 20 years.

In addition to being the first production car with front disc brakes, the DS offered a futuristic hydropneumatic suspension system with adjustable ground clearance, a lightweight fiberglass roof, semi-automatic transmission and front wheel drive.

And that’s just what made it technically beautiful. Aesthetically, the DS’s design was at once revolutionary, futuristic and eminently stylish, and to this day remains an icon of its time and place.

Citroen DS - A car years ahead of its time [Retro Thing]

*With this sentence, we’ve officially lost our claim to the ‘only blog on the planet to have yet mentioned the iPhone’. We apologise. We held out a whole week.