Road and Track has a fascinating article, Why Are French Cars So Strange?, that’s a fun read about how and why French cars became distinctly different to any others on the planet.
I’ve never owned or even driven a French car, although I was well aware of the strange ability of the Citroën DS line of sedans to raise and lower themselves off the ground – Citroën’s hydropneumatic suspension system. But why? What was the point? It’s not like the Mexican re-tooling of American cars, the lowriders, that have hydraulic systems so powerful they can bounce the car to a musical beat and drag that badboy along the road to create a shower of sparks.
The French had different reasons and they are not cosmetic:
This was driven in part by necessity. “France is a large country by European standards,” Ó Cofaigh says, less densely populated and more agrarian. Suspension engineering had to take into consideration high-speed comfort for driving long distances on paved roads as well as use on unpaved rural roads.
However, there were plenty of things about them that were cosmetic:
Influenced by scientific aerodynamics, carrosseries such as Vanvooren, Figoni et Falaschi, Hibbard & Darrin, and Saoutchik crafted lunatic Streamline Moderne designs. Outré elements included round doors and windows, elongated and spatted front fenders, electromagnetic clutches, and pneumatically suctioned retractable roofs. “Design may have been prioritized even at the expense, perhaps, of mobility,” Ó Cofaigh says.
Add to that the input of French aircraft makers following WWI and things got wild very quickly, but have led other car manufacturers to add things like disc brakes and so forth, albeit not in as flashy a manner.
In the last twenty years I’d often wondered how French car makers survived, given their tiny sales compared to the US, German and Chinese giants – they have only 2.4% of the global car market.
But there are two reasons why they have endured, one of which is common knowledge – that the largest French manufacturer, Renault, is part-owned by the French government, so it can’t fail.
The second reason is simply that the French people are dedicated to French cars:
The majority of new cars registered in France come from the Renault Group and Stellantis, parent company of Peugeot and Citroën. France’s love of French cars creates a feedback loop resistant to external influence. When animals evolve in an atypical self-sustaining system, it yields outliers. French cars are the axolotls of the automotive world.
Combine those two things together and you get a willingness to experiment with design and technology, delivering cars that don’t have to fit some bland, globalist idea.
Thank god for that; when I first went to America in the mid-1980’s the cars looked different to NZ, but within a decade they began to lose their distinctiveness; the Ford Mondeo sold in the US looked the same as the one sold in NZ, and this began to spread to other US car makers. Chrysler was the last one to churn out wild-looking automobiles and that didn’t save them from the crash of 2008.
So here’s to French cars, even though I doubt I’ll ever buy one.
No Minister 