On July 14, 6,686 military personnel, 315 vehicles, 98 aircraft, 31 helicopters and 193 horses took part in France’s national day parade on the Champs-Élysées.
We were watching one car.
The DS N°7 ÉLYSÉE was making its first official appearance as the new vehicle of the French Presidency and the first fully electric model to join its official fleet.
Beneath its Bleu Liberté paintwork sits an exclusive oleo-pneumatic suspension designed and developed by Nimbus.
A fully armoured vehicle with a wheelbase extended by 25 cm asks a great deal of its suspension. Comfort, handling and robustness all have to coexist, with no room for guesswork. This was the kind of challenge that reminds us why we do this work.
We were fortunate to take it on alongside Centigon France. In their workshops in Brittany, their teams carried out the complete armouring and fit-out of the vehicle. Centigon is a French leader in security, special-purpose and armoured vehicles, known far beyond France for the quality of its work.
Watching that car travel down the Champs-Élysées on Bastille Day was difficult to put into words. Behind a suspension are experience, calculations, testing and fine adjustments. There are also doubts, questions and the decision to go back and do something again when it is not good enough.
We can’t give too many details about this project, for obvious reasons. But we want you to know something important: when we receive an order from any client, we simply do the best work we can at that moment. And we did exactly the same for this project, just in a different context and for a different vehicle.
So if you’re on Nimbus, the architecture of your suspension is close enough to the one we designed for the DS N°7 that you can proudly say you have a presidential ride :-)
We probably don’t need to say how proud we are. More than that, we are grateful for the honour.
A small part of Nimbus now travels with the President of the French Republic.
Wait. We need to write that again.
A small part of Nimbus now travels with the President of the French Republic.
This is surreal. We are still trying to take it in.