Drastically cutting down the time it takes to get a new car to market is the next big priority, according to the head of design at French carmaker DS. 

Thierry Métroz is in charge of the styling department, tasked with giving the poshed up Citroens the luxury and desirability they need to succeed in a world that likes to look at fancy French cars more than it does buying them. 

He was at the Brussels motor show in January when we sat down to talk to him just before he took the wraps off the Taylor Made No. 4 concept (above), a beefed up sporty looking version of the company’s No. 4 hatchback, based on the same underpinnings as the Vauxhall Astra and Peugeot 308. 

The concept was intended to welcome DS’s new Formula E signing, young British driver Taylor Barnard. Métroz had a couple of meetings with Barnard in October and November of 2025 and then it was a race of its own to get the concept ready. 

“We started building the car at the beginning of December, just before the Christmas holidays,” explains Métroz. “We did the car in one and a half months, it was amazing. My design team really loved doing it – there wasn’t any time for discussion, we just had to get on and do it.”

That pace of development has clearly given Métroz a taste for translating it to production cars, though, because his main message is about how DS needs to speed up its development process to keep pace with up and coming Chinese rivals, who can get new cars to market much quicker and are also able to respond to customer and journalist feedback in a very speedy way.

“We need to develop our cars much faster. Not as fast as this one [the No. 4 concept], but the big challenge – not just for DS, but all European carmakers – is to develop our cars faster,” he says. “Normally it’s three or four years at the moment, but we need to be able to do it in two years. That’s how fast the Chinese brands are developing their cars and we need much more fresh product on the market.”

But given that he has to work with shared platforms handed down from parent group Stellantis, will that make the French designer’s work more difficult? “[Group design boss] Gilles Vidal is pushing a lot to have more flexibility on the shared platforms for brands, getting the engineering teams and factories to be a bit more flexible to create an evolution of the platforms,” he explains. 

It’s been a big job getting brands as varied as Vauxhall, Citroen, Alfa Romeo and Fiat on to the same architecture to pool resources and save money, but now the brands are craving a bit of extra individuality for their cars. There's getting away from the fact that cars like the No. 4, Astra and 308 all look very similar to each other. 

Métroz says that cutting down on the numbers of components involved in actually putting the cars together is a big priority for him, because fewer parts means quicker development and building. But he’s relaxed about the push for speed and cheaper production making his DS creations feel less special: “We can protect the quality and the premium feel even if we go faster. It’s not a big problem.”