alt Hacker News> Citroen has been doing it since the 50's with a purely mechanical system.
I remember watching Citroens demonstrating losing a wheel, and continuing to drive, in the early 1970s.
Citroens are cool. Maybe their build quality wasn't so good, or they were too expensive, as I've not seen them on this side of the pond.
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Just yesterday I was remembering the ride on a Citroen XM in the 90s which has the full blown hydropneumatic suspension (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropneumatic_suspension) . Decades later I haven’t been in a car with such a smooth ride
they even had a project for hydraulic-driven wheels - some kind-of water-mill in each wheel, and a huge pump, and that's it :)
p.s. long time ago i bought a 15y old hydraulic Citroen, drove it for 10 years.. the hydraulics was less breaking than the engine :/ . Now i have another (recent) Citroen but that "road-surface-ignorant" feeling of the hydraulics is completely gone.
I can confirm. Was driving for a while, impervious to any sign of having a flat tyre before someone on the street signalled me to stop. And that was on a Citroen Saxo, which I don’t think had the suspension of C5 etc. Amazing car, lasted for 15 years with me, with only battery and frankly inconsistent oil changes. The lady who bought it when we immigrated still runs it 15 years later. Build quality is a hit and miss per model I think.
Citroën pulled out of the North American market in the 1970s, due to US regulations that required headlights maintained a consistent height. Since their suspensions allowed them to raise and lower their height, there was no way they could be compliant without massive changes to their system. Besides, the Citroën network was not big in the US anyway, and since the DS had few facelifts in its 20 years in production, it was falling out of favour with US consumers who didn't want to be seen driving yesteryear's car.
Their build quality is fine, at least contemporarily to the rest of the market; of course today, we would find its steel pitiful. It's not without reason that people who maintain Citroëns of that era tend to replace the panels with fibreglass ones.
Additionally, as Citroën pulled out, the maintenance network in North America began to falter, as the suspension system required significant know-how. There are still a dedicated group of Citroën fans in North America (albeit small), and I met a lot of them when I drove from coast to coast (and back again) back in 2017 in a 1998 Citroën Xantia. A car that may not seem particularly interesting to Europeans (although it was the Activa V6 model), but it was extremely rare in North America.