Le petit coupe

The first of the mass-market SUV coupes is here in the form of the Citroen Basalt. It's based on the C3 platform but is set apart by its striking silhouette. We hop in to see how different it is from its siblings

- Dipayan Dutta

The SUV coupe is here to subdivide an already saturated segment of SUVs further. Even beginning to speculate about where they figure and how many segments they will overlap is a headache inducer. But we’ll skip around that since the SUV on this page is something that we’ve driven without knowing the price.

At the time, knowing Citroen’s propensity for breaking convention with pricing I wouldn’t even have dared venture a guess. What we know so far is that the Citroen Basalt is an SUV Coupe; it’s the first of its kind in the mass market and given the timing and the position it is likely to be viewed alongside the Tata Curv that we’ve also driven this month albeit in EV format.

The Basalt is based on the C3 smart car platform, part of the C-cubed program but it’s slightly longer than the C3 Aircross, slightly narrower and gets a 20mm shorter wheelbase. The differences are minimal but indicate a ground-up approach to engineering the Basalt. From the perspective of design and the subsequent presence, even a nay-sayer such as myself couldn’t hold a candle to the Basalt’s presence. At the front, the Basalt is very similar to its SUV sibling, with the angular DRLs mounted both along the bonnet line and inset into the headlamp body combined with the chrome inserts that appear to run into the double chevron badges at the centre. In all you have a recognizable but tastefully cohesive front end. The foglamps are integrated differently and the Basalt gets its own slightly chunkier reprofiled bumpers.