Did you know you can dress the tiny Citroen Ami as a shrunken 1950s van?
Somebody looked at the cheapest EV in Europe and thought: needs more 1950s
The Citroen Ami is many things, a tiny electric city runabout, a licence-light quadricycle, a design curiosity, but nobody would call it retro. At least, not until now. An Italian coachbuilder has worked out how to turn Citroen's smallest, most modern creation into a rolling tribute to one of its most beloved classics, and the result is as charming as it is faintly ridiculous.
A mini HY van
The company is Caselani, based in northern Italy, and its Type-Ami kit reskins the Citroen Ami to look like a shrunken Citroen HY, the corrugated, snub-nosed delivery van that trundled around France until 1981 and still turns up today as a hipster coffee truck. It is not a random project either: Caselani already builds official HY-style body conversions for modern Citroen vans like the Berlingo and Jumpy, so this is simply the pint-sized member of the family.
How it works
The kit is a set of fibreglass body panels with all the brackets and screws you need, and it fits both new and used Amis. The conversion is entirely cosmetic: you unbolt the Ami's original plastic panels, bolt on the retro ones, and you are done. Nothing mechanical changes, so it keeps the standard Ami's 8 hp electric motor, its 45 km/h top speed and its roughly 75 km of range. It also keeps the Ami's party trick of being drivable by fourteen-year-olds in many European countries. The design was penned by David Obendorfer with input from the Citroen Style Centre, and each kit is handmade in Italy.
The catch is the price
Here is where you raise an eyebrow. The body kit alone costs around 5,000 euros, and since a base Citroen Ami starts at roughly 8,000 euros, a finished Type-Ami adds up to about 13,000 euros. That is a lot of money for what is, mechanically, still a two-seat electric quadricycle that tops out at 45 km/h. You are paying a serious premium purely for the way it looks, which is either completely mad or completely the point, depending on your outlook.
AutoNext Take
Objectively, 13,000 euros for a dressed-up Ami makes no sense at all. Subjectively, we absolutely love it. The whole appeal of the Ami has always been that it is a design toy as much as a means of transport, and turning it into a tiny classic van is the most Ami thing imaginable. As a delivery vehicle for a bakery, a florist or a beach bar, it would be pure marketing gold, and it would make everyone who saw it smile, which counts for something.
It also says something nice about where small electric cars are going. When even the cheapest, most basic EV on the market can become a canvas for a bit of coachbuilt joy, the future does not have to be as grey and identical as the doom-mongers claim. Nobody needs a mini HY-van Ami. But the world is a slightly better place for the fact that it exists, and that someone in northern Italy is quietly building them by hand.
