The B10 was the first European car maker to apply the pressed steel technologies, developed by Ambi-Budd, and which during the next fifteen years would transform the economics of automobile production across Europe.
[1] The size of the 4-cylinder engine remained at 1,452 cc, and as with the earlier model, the B10 was sometimes known as the Citroën 10CV (or 10HP),[1] the HP in the suffix being a reference to its fiscal power, a number computed according to the cylinder diameters and used to define its taxation class.
The heavy presses needed to make the steel panels were expensive, which was leading to a situation in Germany whereby many auto-makers would soon be buying their car bodies from one Ambi-Budd factory in Berlin.
In France larger auto-makers, starting with Citroën, but fairly soon followed by Peugeot and Renault (who got themselves into an acrimonious litigation with Ambi-Budd over alleged patent infringements) invested in order to establish their own press-shops.
Regardless of whether the bodies came from an Ambi-Budd factory in Berlin or were stamped using presses in the manufacturer's own premises, further heavy investment was needed for the dies to make the individual panels which more often than not were different for each car model.
The challenge, not just for the auto-makers, but also for their accountants, bankers and other investors, involved record creation and paying to amortize the up-front capital cost over a series of cars that might be in production for five years or more.
Provided that the burden of financing the initial capital investment could be sustained until it had been paid off through the production and sale of sufficient cars, producing cars with all-steel bodies could be very profitable, with the added bonus that France's second tier auto-makers would never be able to contemplate the capital investment necessary, so that through the later 1920s and 1930s the leading automakers in the volume sector relentlessly gained market share while smaller competitors fell by the wayside.