Marchal/Cibie for Citroen DS

[Milou]

It seems that the hood lights with Marchal/Cibie lens were originally made at the request of Citroen for the DS. As a French car company, Citroen was encouraged to work with both French light suppliers and avoid exclusive deals.
This is what a Cibie heir explained to me last week. Often the "hardware" part of driving/fog lights in the Sixties and early Seventies were shared by both brands and only the lens changed. Facing competition from Bosch, both brands eventually merged first under SEV Marchal and then Valleo.

[Zithlord]

Cool info Milou!!

Can you by any chance find out at what year they started and stopped production of the Pallas modell?

John

[tfiv]

Citroen was on the leading edge of lots of automotive technology back then.

[Milou]

Will ask about the years, but I doubt she will be able to provide me with very specific information as it does go 35 years back and it's probably Citroen that has this type of info.

She also told me that they never sponsored individual drivers but gave away lots of free lights, stickers, and promotional material to private teams for big races such as Spa, le Mans, Reims, Tour de France, etc...

She spent several holidays with the Porsche family as her father Mr. Cibie and Ferry Porsche worked closely together:

French laws at the time required yellow lights on all cars so fitting headlights for imported cars was an important market.

In exchange for sponsoring factory racing Porsches, Cibie negotiated the contract to fit yellow headlights to french imported 911 and 914 for that year.
Things were done more casually at the time, so human memory remains unreliable, but often the only surviving memory.

[kenikh]

Damn, the secret is out.