Chic and super-stylish: the best French cars ever made
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The national characteristics of a country’s population are often reflected in the products of its motor industry. There are few better examples than that of France. French cars are rarely luxurious (though there have been notable exceptions) but they very often have some combination of simplicity, practicality, innovation, sportiness and of course style.
To illustrate the point, here’s a representative selection of iconic cars which it would be difficult to imagine being devised anywhere other than France.
Alpine A110
Arguably one of the most beautiful French sports cars ever, the A110 was similar to the slightly less attractive A108 it replaced in that the body and chassis were Alpine’s own but the mechanical parts were bought in from Renault. The engine used in the original 1963 car was the one-litre unit used in the Renault 8, but larger and more powerful ones of up to 1.7 litres were fitted over the next 14 years.
Renault bought the Alpine company in 1973 and decided to run the A110 in that year’s inaugural World Rally Championship. It was incredibly successful. achieving victory on events as varied as the snow-covered Monte Carlo and the all-gravel Acropolis in Greece. After just six of the 13 rounds, the Alpine team had scored more points than second-placed Fiat would do all season.
By then the A110 was near the end of its development as both a competition car and a road-going one, and it went out of production in 1977. But its place in motoring history was assured.
Bugatti Royale
The Royale is a glorious exception to the rule that French manufacturers don’t build luxury cars. More than 20 feet long, weighing over three tonnes and with a 12.7-litre engine that was actually smaller than the one used in the prototype, it was fantastically luxurious, and intended to be sold only to extremely rich, and preferably royal, customers.
Unfortunately, it was built around the time of the Great Depression, a particularly bad time for luxury car sales. Bugatti intended to build 25, but in fact production didn’t even reach double figures.
The car as a whole was an economic disaster for Bugatti, but the engine wasn’t. Around two hundred examples were built for use in French trains.
Bugatti Tank
If you want to design a modern Grand Prix car you have to know a great deal about aerodynamics. In 1923 the subject was poorly understood and generally ignored within the sport. Bugatti was one of the few teams to pay any attention to it.
The short-lived Type 32 was short, streamlined and possibly the ugliest car Bugatti ever built. Nicknamed the Tank, for obvious reasons, it finished third in the French Grand Prix, largely because 12 of its 17 rivals retired, were disqualified or didn’t turn up.
The Tank beat an even stranger-looking streamlined French car called the Voisin Laboratoire, but finished 25 minutes behind the winning Sunbeam, which was British and appeared far more conventional. Bugatti abandoned its aerodynamic experiment for its next race car, the very much more successful Type 35.
Bugatti Type 35
The Type 35 is regarded by some as one of the world’s most beautiful racing cars. It was certainly the most successful ever created by Bugatti, or indeed by anyone else.
Several hundred were built between 1924 and 1927, and they won several Grand Prix races (including the first at Monaco). Type 35s were also victorious in the Targa Florio race, held on public roads in Sicily, for five consecutive years. They are a common sight at many historic motorsport events to this day.
Citroen 2CV
Small and very light, yet usefully roomy and able to tackle almost any kind of road, the 2CV is the poster child for basic but effective family transport. The ingenuity of its design would have been of no interest to most of its several million buyers. They simply wanted something cheap, useful and reliable, and they certainly got it.
As cars originally intended to be merely functional often are, the 2CV also became greatly loved by more sentimental drivers. This was largely because of its undoubtedly quirky looks. Few cars had quite such an eccentric appearance, and most of those were other small Citroens using very similar technology.
After 42 years, the 2CV’s lack of both refinement and crashworthiness had become too much, and production stopped in 1990. More than a quarter of a century on, however, it remains a much loved car.
Citroen DS
With the exception of the later SM, no car has ever displayed Citroen’s talent for innovation to quite the same extent as the DS. At one time or another during its long run it featured cornering headlights, high-level rear indicators, a semi-automatic gearbox and self-levelling hydraulic suspension with a choice of ride heights.
This is a specification you’d be hard pressed to find on a modern car, yet Citroen stopped building the DS in 1975 after a production run lasting 20 years.
Both the DS and its simpler equivalent, the ID, were successful in top-level motorsport, winning the Monte Carlo Rally, the 1000 Lakes (Finland) and very nearly the 1968 London-to-Sydney Marathon. They were also popular choices among French taxi drivers, while at a higher level a DS was used as an official car for President Charles de Gaulle, who survived an assassination attempt in one.
Citroen Mehari
Named after a breed of camel once used for transport by the French military, the Mehari was a member of the 2CV family. With no roof or doors, it was similar in concept to the British Mini Moke which had already been on sale for four years by the time the Mehari appeared in 1968.
Like the Moke or the various Volkswagen-based Beach Buggies, the Mehari gives the impression of being a beach car, and was indeed a common sight at one point in towns along the south coast of France. However, both the French and, to a much lesser extent, Irish armies also founded uses for it.
Perhaps the most stylish car of its type if not the best known, the Mehari went out of production in 1988. It was never replaced, though the Mehari name was used again in 2015 for a battery-powered and very airy concept version of the C4 Cactus.
Citroen Saxo
Cramped, poorly equipped and closely related to the AX which had been designed ten years earlier, the Saxo was a very long way from being Citroen’s best car, yet around the turn of the century it was almost the default choice of young British drivers.
Citroen’s UK divison made sure of this by offering a tempting finance deal, paying the deposit itself and providing a year’s free insurance. Max Power, the most popular of the “boy racer” magazines being published at the time, played its part in the Saxo’s success by regularly featuring readers’ cars modified using parts supplied by various tuning and styling companies eager to be part of the scene.
Production stopped in 2003 and the glory days were soon over, but the Saxo is still to be found in large numbers on UK race circuits. Ten small hatchback models are eligible for the 750 Motor Club’s Stock Hatch Championship, but in 2016 all but one of the regular competitors drove Saxos.
Citroen SM
The SM was conceived as a sporting alternative to the DS saloon car, and was every bit as technically advanced. Like the DS, it had self-levelling suspension and cornering headlights. It also came with self-adjusting brake balance, rain-sensitive windscreen wipers and radical power-assisted steering (later carried over to the CX) which was very clever but took some getting used to.
The engine, of first 2.7 and then three litres, was a V6 supplied by Maserati, which had been taken over by Citroen in 1968, two years before the SM appeared. Although contemporary rivals from BMW, Jaguar and Mercedes had more power, no other Citroen did until 1990.
Brilliant as it was, the SM was only briefly popular. New owner Peugeot, which had taken over the now bankrupt Citroen company, axed it in 1975, by which time sales had fallen almost to nothing.
Citroen Traction Avant
Traction Avant is the nickname used for a series of Citroens officially known as the 7CV, Light Fifteen and Big Six, among other titles. The original, dating from 1934, had features which are absolutely commonplace now but were very unusual at the time.
These included front-wheel drive (or traction avant as it’s called in France) and a body that provided the structure rather than being mounted on a separate chassis. The second feature made the car both stronger and lighter, and allowed it to ride much closer to ground level.
Development costs, including the construction of a new factory, crippled Citroen. The company was declared bankrupt in the same year the Traction Avant went on sale but was saved by the Michelin tyre company. The car survived too, and remained in production until 1957.
Peugeot 205 GTI
The 205 supermini was quite unlike any Peugeot that had gone before it and was a huge success right from the start, helped by its association with the T16 World Rally Championship car which was mechanically quite different but looked vaguely similar.
In general, 205s were very good. The pick of the range, though, was the GTI, available with first a 1.6- and then a 1.9-litre engine. Powerful enough to be quite quick for a 1980s car in a straight line, the GTI was nevertheless celebrated more for its handling, which was quite superb though apt to be tricky if you didn’t know what you were doing.
UK sales were badly hit in the early 90s by rocketing insurance premiums which at the time seemed to have killed the very idea of the hot hatch. It is now regarded as one of the finest cars of its type ever made, arguably unequalled by any Peugeot since and possibly by anyone else either.
Peugeot 504
Largely – but undeservedly – forgotten in the UK, the Peugeot 504 was named European Car of the Year in 1969. It was sold mostly as a not very dramatic looking saloon or estate (the latter with up to seven seats), but also as a much more attractive coupe or convertible or as a pickup truck.
The 504 was incredibly tough, and for that reason it was also very popular in Africa both as a road car and a competition one – rallying versions of the saloon and coupe won several World Championship events on that continent.
Peugeot stopped building 504s in Europe in 1983, but they were still being assembled in Africa well into the 21st century. Total production exceeded three and a half million.
Renault 4
Renault designed the 4 as a more modern and refined rival to the Citroen 2CV – a point not lost on then Citroen boss Francois Michelin, who was reportedly quite grumpy about the 4’s appearance at the 1961 Paris Motor Show.
It was an extremely important car for Renault, which was in severe financial trouble at the time following a collapse in American sales. 4s were built and sold in enormous numbers. It took just four and a half years for the first million to be produced, and by the time the car was discontinued in the early 1990s the total had passed eight million.
By Renault’s estimation, this makes it the third most popular car in history, after the Volkswagen Beetle and Model T Ford and a long way ahead of the 2CV.
Cheap and practical as so many French cars have been, the 4 was loved across the world. It was known affectionately as the Frog in Italy, the Noddy Car in Zimbabwe, the Droplet in Finland and, most charmingly of all, the Faithful Friend in Colombia.
Renault 4CV
Known as the 750 in the UK, the 4CV was the first car to be produced by the newly nationalised Renault after World War II. Similar in concept to the Volkswagen Beetle (though Renault boss and former French Resistance fighter Pierre Lefaucheux strongly denied there was any connection) it was simple and cheap enough to be capable of selling well despite France’s economic struggles of the late 1940s.
By the end of the decade the 4CV was France’s most popular car, and by the time production (mostly in France but also in Spain, the UK, Australia and Japan) finally stopped in 1961 it had become the first French model to sell over a million units.
Renault 5 Turbo
In nearly all its forms, the extremely popular and successful Renault 5 was yet another small, cheap and simple French car. The 5 Turbo was something else entirely.
Confusingly, it wasn’t the only turbocharged 5 Renault built, and it bore only a passing resemblance to other 5s. Uniquely, its engine (a high-performance version of the unit first seen in the 8 Gordini) was mounted not under the bonnet but where the rear seats would normally be. Very impractical as a road car, its main purpose was to be the basis of Renault’s World Rally Championship contender.
This car won its first event, the 1981 Monte Carlo Rally, but would win only three more World Championship rounds in the next five years, being unable to keep up with the new generation of four-wheel drive cars such as the Audi Quattro. Nevertheless, the road version was the most exciting small Renault until the Clio V6 came along twenty years later.
Renault Avantime
The Avantime showed that the French fondness for automotive eccentricity was still going strong at the turn of the 21st century. Designed and built by Matra but styled by Renault, it was essentially a cross between a large MPV and a sports coupe, providing a solution to a problem nobody knew they had.
It looked quite unlike anything else on the road and had plenty of equipment. The double-hinged doors were innovative, though they didn’t open very far so you had to walk round them to get in, and their largely unsupported windows rattled noisily every time you shut the doors. The ride and handling reminded you that the Avantime was far more of an MPV than a sports car.
Sales were poor, and the Avantime was abandoned in 2003 after fewer than 9000 units had been built. It still has its fans, though, and it certainly provides a good example of the kind of car only Renault would have thought of offering to the public.
Renault Clio
Renault has used the Clio name for four generations of small hatchback since 1990. Few of them are yet considered as iconic as the very popular Nicole and Papa advertising campaign of the 1990s, but that doesn’t apply to the high-performance versions.
Other than the two mid-engined V6 models, these have all been front-wheel drive and have used engines with power outputs of roughly 150 to 200bhp. The first was the Clio 1993 Williams, named after the F1 team to which Renault supplied engines, and there have since been many others, usually bearing the Renaultsport name.
Early Clios were very successful in rallying, and there are one-make race championships for the car across Europe and in China. The UK version has been running since 1991, apart from a four-year break when the Renault Spider sports car was used instead. Clios are also immensely popular among British trackday enthusiasts.
Renault Espace
The Espace had a long and complicated history involving several manufacturers before Renault finally put it on the market in 1984. It wasn’t the world’s first MPV (or “people carrier” as they were called in those days) but it was certainly one of the very early ones, and played a big part in popularising that type of car in Europe.
Early Espaces were manufactured by the versatile Matra company. It wasn’t until the fourth-generation car, launched in 2002, that Renault completely took over development and production.
Renault stopped selling the Espace on the UK market in 2012 as part of a money-saving exercise which also eliminated four other models and about a third of the dealer network. A new version – more of a crossover SUV than an MPV – was introduced in 2015, but it has never been sold here.