If You’re A Freak, This Is The Best Car Auction In Decades

If there’s one critique I have of most car auctions, it’s that they’re a bit predictable. A blue-chip Ferrari here, a rare Porsche there, maybe a handful of muscle cars sprinkled in. A sampling of what the market wants, which makes perfect sense considering the goal of an auction is to sell cars for the highest possible prices. However, what if an auction contained cars that made no sense whatsoever? Well, that’s about to go down in France. It’s called the Renault Icons, and it’s the most insane car auction I’ve seen in absolute ages.

Come 2027, Renault plans to open a new museum with basically one of everything, all under one roof. It’s a great initiative, but it also means paring back the heritage collection to a number closer to 600 cars. Unsurprisingly, when you’ve been making cars since the late 1800s, you’re going to have some duplicates.

However, this sort of fleet rationalization is a prime opportunity for car nerds, because Renault has just decided to have Artcurial auction off what it no longer needs. While a handful of normal cars and a whole heaping of race cars have found their way into the mix, the rest of the auction is like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory for the terminally automotively unhinged. Let’s just take a gander, shall we?

Let’s kick things off with one of the more sane one-off creations being auctioned off, a six-wheeled Renault Clio pickup truck. Yeah, a front-wheel-drive subcompact hatchback probably isn’t the obvious choice for this sort of conversion, but it happened for a good reason.

Renault’s factory workers needed metalwork training, so somewhere along the line, someone decided to have fun with it. While this prototype can’t be driven on the road, the world’s better off thanks to its mere existence. It’s wild, joyous, a visual rumpus, and it can actually be driven at low speeds. Plus, it should go for fairly cheap. Artcurial estimates this Clio pickup will bring in between €3,000 and €6,000.

In case this metalwork training exercise doesn’t float your boat, how about an actual concept car? There are several for offer, but I’m quite fond of the Operandi, a commercial counterpart to the Modus 2 concept car. Now that’s wordplay you can get behind. Simultaneously upright and bubbly, this thing surfs a wave of Frutiger Aero to be a time capsule of the new millennium. Sure, it might just be a pusher model, meaning it doesn’t run or drive, but it’s still a cool bit of sculpture. Best of all, it should be dirt-cheap, with an estimated sale price of less than €3,000 and no reserve.

Or, if you want to go weirder, check out the 1989 Chausson P.E.R.L.E concept car, which isn’t a Renault. It shares an engine with the Renault 11, but this rotund concept is purely the work of coachbuilder Chausson. With a model name standing for “Projet d’Études et de Recherches d’une Ligne Européenne” (European Line Study and Research Project), this dental dam-green concept is gloriously weird right down to the flat-bottom split-single-spoke steering wheel. Its futuristic appearance earned it a cameo in the film Until the End of the World, but this project didn’t exactly give Chausson a new lifeline. Still, with an expected hammer range of €4,000 to €8,000, the P.E.R.L.E. could be an excellent deal.

While the P.E.R.L.E is a gloriously strange design wrapped around normal mechanicals, here’s something that offers a relatively normal design wrapped around gloriously strange mechanicals. It might look like a normal Renault Espace people carrier, but it’s not. It’s a prototype hybrid called the VERT. In theory, it should do about 100 miles on battery power alone before the gas turbine kicks on. Yes, gas turbine, like an aircraft engine. Unfortunately, this example doesn’t run right now because it’s missing some minor electrical equipment. However, in an age of cheap custom PCBs, there’s a chance some genius could theoretically recommission it. Imagine gliding alone with a 90,000 RPM gas turbine spinning an alternator.

But what you’ve seen so far is nothing compared to this:

Here’s a 1986 Renault 21 that appears to have twelve doors, and that’s not even the strangest thing about it. There’s a second passenger compartment perched atop the main one, the steering column is about as long as a Mini, two of the wheels do nothing, the seat behind the steering wheel swivels, and then there’s the sort of conceptual engine sculpture going on ahead of the firewall. If you expect drugs to be involved in the creation of this thing, they’re actually involved in the lore. See, this Renault 21 is actually a bit famous.

This incredible car appeared in the film Lévy and Goliath, directed by Gérard Oury in 1987 and starring Richard Anconina and Michel Boujenah. Anconina played a diamond merchant and, through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, the diamond powder he was bringing back to Antwerp was replaced by cocaine. Without being aware that the two bags had been swapped, he delivered what he believed to be diamond powder to the Renault factory, where it was used for industrial purposes, but the cocaine had some harmful effects on the production line and resulted in the car we are offering for sale.

Well, that’s a new one to add to my Letterboxd watchlist. Oh, and in case that isn’t weird enough, this Renault 21 is set up like the double-decker cars from Top Gear in that the person in the top level steers, while the person in the bottom level works the pedals. It’s unhinged, but with an expected sale price of €4,000 or less, worth it.

Mind you, I’m barely scratching the surface here. The auction’s also offering a Prost-era Formula 1 computer station, an electric first-generation Twingo, concept cars from later in the 2000s, a shedload of Formula 1 cars, a 97-inch-long plush in the shape of a third-generation Twingo … the list goes on. We’re talking 180 lots. There’s something for every budget here, and it’s all glorious. It’s all going down on Dec. 7, so book your flights to Paris and take a hire car to Renault’s Flin factory. Let’s get weird.

Top graphic image: Artcurial