The 2016 Citroen Cactus has been confirmed for sale in Australia, with the French car maker announcing it’ll arrive early in 2016.

YOU MIGHT THINK that the last thing the world, and particularly Australia needs, is another small SUV. But apparently not, as Citroen has announced it will launch Down Under the 2016 Cactus. Now normally these releases contain very little of interest, but this time there are Airbumps. You can see on the side black bumps, and these are “…a multitude of air capsules under a flexible skin TPU (Thermo Plastic Urethane)”. This skin “absorbs small bumps and provides better resistance to scratches.”. It is also available in different colours.

In the future, car skins will be hard to damage, self-repairing and probably generate electricity via solar power.  So this represents another small step along that path, and it’s good to see some innovation in the area of vehicle protection.

Now to the name. Citroen told us was well aware of what ‘cactus’ means in Australia, but referred us to the plant rather that the urban dictionary of slang.  There is actually some logic behind this – cacti are tough (although Citroen say the Cactus is for urban environments) and don’t use much water, and indeed the windscreen washers are designed such that they use less water than normal ones. And changing a name is always hard work. 

The Cactus has won a few awards overseas including Most Beautiful Interior, and as usual the local operation claims to be excited about the car. Unusually for a vehicle of this nature there’s actually some pre-orders, so maybe that excitement is justified. Certainly you can rely on Citroen to produce something a bit quirky, and that’s important in this sector of achingly boring lookalike whitegoods, so we look forwards to our first drive.