Citroën AMI: we test the 7,000-euro electric car

The Citroën AMI will be available in our market in March 2021, and you can already reserve it on the brand’s website. The price starts from 7,000 euros, and it will be sold exclusively online. To do so, Citroën has signed agreements with Fnac. You can buy the car and have it delivered to your home (with a surcharge of around 200 euros), or go to a dealership to pick it up. In France, for example, the first data indicate that two out of three customers who buy an AMI choose home delivery.

We have already driven it, and we can tell you what we thought of this electric “microcar“.

A light quadricycle you can drive without a driving licence

Before we start, it is worth clarifying one thing: the Citroën AMI is not classified as a car or passenger vehicle, it is a light quadricycle. What is popularly known as “cars you can drive without a licence“, although in reality you need an AM moped licence, which can be obtained from the age of 15. This comes with a number of limitations. For example, the top speed is limited to 45 km/h, and the AMI cannot be driven on motorways or dual carriageways.

You need to keep this very clearly in mind if you think of the AMI as an alternative mobility solution to an electric scooter. Because that is really what the AMI is: a vehicle for exclusively urban use or in rural areas, which can solve the mobility needs of people who have no access to, or no possibility of obtaining, a driving licence.

Its four-wheeled alternatives are therefore the Renault Twizy or the eAixam. To put things in perspective, the Twizy starts from 11,855 euros. It is just as original as the AMI, if not more so, in its design, but it seems more like a four-wheeled “motorbike” with a roof than a bodied car. The eAixam is “more car” than the AMI in terms of construction, steering feel, safety equipment and comfort… but it is also more expensive: it is available from 15,499 euros.

The main features of the Citroën AMI

The “microcar” label is accurate: the AMI measures barely 2.4 metres long and 1.4 metres wide. To give you an idea, that is almost 30 cm less in length and width than a Smart fortwo, which is homologated as a “proper” car. This means the AMI takes up less than half a parking space: two of them fit in the same space where you would park a compact SUV.

The construction of the AMI is somewhat unusual. It is built around a tubular steel structure on which the polycarbonate bodywork is mounted, and to which the suspension and motor are anchored. The design is symmetrical, which saves on the number of parts and simplifies (as well as cheapens) manufacturing.

There are no programmed deformation structures or safety and insulation measures like those found in conventional cars. Even the tubes that form the chassis are left exposed once you settle into the interior. What the AMI does have are suspensions like those you would find in a supermini, with a McPherson strut at the front and a torsion beam at the rear. The small 6 kW electric motor (8.2 CV) – the maximum permitted for quadricycle homologation – drives the front wheels. The wheels are always 14 inches, with 155/65 tyres.

With a total weight of 470 kg, the AMI accelerates surprisingly well for the modest power the motor delivers: from 0 to 100 km/h in 10 seconds. As we will see later, this gives great agility when setting off each time you have to stop in town. That agility is lost as soon as traffic flows freely, since the top speed is limited to 45 km/h.

Under the seats we find the battery, with a capacity of 5.5 kWh. It can be recharged in about three hours from a domestic socket, using the cable stored in the passenger door. The homologated range under the cycle that governs this type of vehicle is 70 km. Optionally, you can buy a cable for use at public charging points.
Asymmetric design and “at home” personalisation

Its symmetrical design is one of the features that draws the most attention to the Citroën AMI. Given how small it is and how original it looks, it turns heads as it passes. This symmetry means that when you see it from a distance, it is hard to tell whether it is going or coming: apart from the colour of the headlights, it looks identical from the front and the back.

Symmetry, as we have noted, is primarily there not for originality but for cost savings, as it greatly reduces the number of panels and parts. Even the fact that the driver’s door opens in the opposite direction to travel while the passenger’s door opens conventionally is down to this saving: this way, the doors are identical.

Another feature that makes the Citroën AMI special is its personalisation concept, with a series of element packs that you can collect from the dealership and fit yourself. There are four packs that you literally take home in a box, called My AMI Grey, Blue, Orange or Khaki. They include everything from stickers or mats to storage trays for the dashboard, or the central unit called DAT@MI, which lets you use your mobile phone as a multimedia hub.

Alongside these four interior themes there are two exterior personalisation packs that do require fitting by specialists. These are the My AMI Pop, with a sporty look, including orange tones and a rear spoiler; and the My AMI Vibe, which aims for elegance with grey colours and roof trim. These packs are expensive in proportion to the price of the car: between 900 and around 1,200 euros.
The Citroën AMI inside: simpler, impossible

Inside, two things immediately catch your attention: the brightness, thanks to the large glazed area, and the simplicity that governs a cabin that is roomier than you would expect from its exterior size. There are two seats, placed side by side (in the Twizy the passenger sits behind the driver), though with some overlap.

The driver’s seat can slide to find the best possible driving position, but the passenger seat is fixed to the bodywork. As the driver needs to sit closer to or further from the wheel, the passenger will sit further back in relation to them. There are no space issues, either in height or for legroom. And although it is a car designed for urban (and short) journeys, a gap has been left in front of the passenger’s legs where a cabin-sized suitcase could be placed. In addition, you can carry an extra bag in the area behind the two seats.

There are many details that give an idea of how simple the AMI is inside, to the point of reminding you in many respects – allowing for the differences – of a toy car or a golf buggy. For example, the fabric straps for opening the doors, the almost total absence of controls, buttons or any kind of trim, the rigid seats with minimal upholstery, or the windows in the style of the Citroën 2CV. These do not wind down; you can only tilt the lower half upwards.

This simplicity carries over into driving, and that is when you begin to understand that the Citroën AMI, as the brand itself says, is NOT a car. Because it does not have them, it cannot have airbags or air conditioning. Nor sun visors or an interior rear-view mirror, although it seems one will be offered later as an option.
Your phone acts as the multimedia system

There is not even pre-installation for a radio. The “multimedia” system is your own phone, which you can hold in a specific clip-type mount and connect to a USB port via the aforementioned DAT@MI, which is sold separately.

The speaker is portable, cylindrical in shape so it fits into a recess behind the steering wheel, and connects to the phone via Bluetooth. I don’t think it is a bad alternative.

We have not driven the AMI on a hot day. But we can already anticipate that it could be an “inferno”, with so much glazed area, no possibility of air conditioning and not even the ability to lower the windows. The heating may be sufficient in winter to avoid being cold, as it would be on a scooter or, for that matter, in the versions of the Renault Twizy without side doors. But it is not enough to clear the condensation that forms on the part of the windscreen furthest from the air outlet on the dashboard. Nor on the side windows, let alone the external mirrors, which are manually adjusted and designed in pure scooter style.

This can be a major drawback in winter for visibility and driving comfort: either you turn on the heating, which, as we said, you cannot regulate in intensity and is very noisy, or you have to drive with the windows “half” open, and I mean that literally, because you cannot open them fully.
Behind the wheel of the Citroën AMI

The AMI’s simplicity carries over to the

instrumentation and the controls. The instrument display is very small, single-colour, and tells you only the essentials: speed, battery charge status (with an icon like a mobile phone, but without showing a percentage), remaining range and distance travelled.

Driving the Citroën AMI through a city like Madrid, in fact driving any quadricycle, can be a very stressful experience for anyone who has never driven a vehicle of this type and does not know what it involves. The 45 km/h speed limit – it “sticks” there even downhill – makes you feel like an obstacle on everything except narrow streets or one-way roads.

Traffic on wider roads moves at a different pace, unreachable for the AMI, which even seems to get intimidated when a bus approaches from behind. However, when it comes to driving through narrow streets, or even pulling away first at traffic lights, the AMI shows surprising agility.

It has a turning circle of just over 7 metres, so manoeuvring is a breeze, even though it has no power steering. Engine braking when you lift off the accelerator means you often don’t need to use the brakes; if you have to brake on wet ground, be careful during an emergency stop or when something unexpected happens, even at the low speeds the AMI can reach, because there is no ABS system.

Once on the move, everything good about the AMI is amplified: it feels more and more agile and easy to drive. But so do the bad points. The suspension is very firm, which is particularly noticeable given the lack of cushioning in the seats. And the interior noise is not what you would expect from an electric car; you can actually hear more noise than in a car with a combustion engine. With no sound insulation whatsoever, both the tyre rolling noise on the asphalt and the noise of the cars circulating around you are clearly audible.

For what the AMI is designed for, the 70 km range it claims may be sufficient. We could not verify that figure – we covered a distance of around 20 km – but it will easily exceed 50 km in any case, since consumption is very low. More than enough for the use a car – sorry, a quadricycle – that wants to break many conventions is intended for.

Among them, the way it is bought… and used. Citroën already offers in France the option of renting it with a deposit from around 2,700 euros and a monthly fee of 20 euros. And with the Free2Move service, subscribers, who pay a monthly fee of around 10 euros, can drive an AMI for periods of time starting at 0.26 euros per minute.
Citroën AMI image gallery

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Technical specifications of this car

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