This Flyer For US 2CV Imports In The 1980s Is Pretty Funny

So, guess what! I’m finally getting one of my dream cars, a Citroën 2CV. I don’t have it just yet – the car in question is the one our own Stephen Walter Gossin picked up late last summer, among a lot of old Mopars, and has been working on, off and on, ever since. I realized this was my best chance to get a 2CV and I’d be a fool, a miserable, sad fool, if I didn’t leap at this chance. So, leap I did, and pretty soon I should be the owner of a 29 horsepower corrugated French-plowed-field-traversing beast. The car is still with SWG at the moment, and I’ll need to tow it home (SWG got it like 95% there – I just need to put in a new fuel pump and check some ignition stuff) but I did go out there to pick up a massive stash of parts and documentation that come with the car, and I just want to show you something interesting from there.

I’m still sort of in shock I’m on my way to Deux Cheveaux ownership! I’ve wanted one of these absurdly and brilliantly minimal cars as long as I can remember, and it’s never really seemed possible. And now, here it is, looming Gallicly in the near future. I’ll have lots, lots more to say about the car once I get it, but for the moment, I want to show you a brochure that’s evidence of an interesting blip in 2CV history, from a short-lived attempt to bring 2CVs to America in the 1980s.

Before that, though, let me just show you a delighted me in this car that’ll soon be mine:

Soon! I can’t wait.

Anyway, while this 2CV is registered as a ’66, and I’m told it’s on a ’66 chassis, everything else seems to be from the ’80s, likely an ’82 or ’85 or so. I do not think this is an original Charleston 2CV – the name given to that rakish Art-Deco-style two tone paint – but I think it was converted to one. And I think this one is what is known as a Target 2CV, after the Dutch company Target Industries, which was re-manufacturing 2CVs in Belgium and sending them to the US. The “aging” process to get “new” 2CVs into America by using older frames (the 2CV was banned for import to the US around 1965) is written about here, if you’re curious.

Here’s an article from 1987 describing the company and what they intend to do; they wanted to import 300 2CVs a month by 1988! A Texan named Terry Keeton, who was well-known in the Citroën community in America, was their sales manager, and back in 1988 these started at $6,750 – about $19,000 today, so while not crazy expensive, not that cheap, either. I was excited to find one of the company’s brochures in with all the stuff I got with the 2CV – which was considerable:

There’s bumpers and another carb, two mufflers, an oil cooler, belts and hoses, a new taillight lens, eight extra wheels and tires, even! And, of course, brochures and owner’s manuals and other literature, which included the Target 2CV brochure. Here’s the cover:

As you can tell, the company was playing a lot on the obscurity and strangeness of the car, and having fun with that. Look at this amazing checklist for the 2CV’s features that was in the brochure:

That’s pretty funny, right? The 2CV has, of course, none of that frippery. Some entries are a little weird, though: “female voice control?” I think they may have meant the spate of talking cars in the ’80s, but it wasn’t really “control” and the voices weren’t even always “female” so who the hell knows what they were getting at. Still, it’s fun.

As you can see in the body copy here, the company was clearly trying to target iconoclasts and weirdos, which I think is admirable. The choices of Pintos and Delta 88s as “ordinary people” cars is an interesting of what the general American carscape of the 1980s was like. Also, this may be the only example I can think of where a brochure promoting a particular car describes it as “asthmatically wheezing down the freeway.”

The 2CV currently waiting to be pulled out of SWG’s crowded driveway seems to be one of these Target 2CVs, and was purchased in the 1980s by its former owner, Willie Shaw, who once had it written about, back in 2009, by the Garland, North Carolina paper:

Willie seems to have led a fascinating life (he was a motorcycle cop in NYC in the ’70s and ’80s, which must have been, um, something) and was a real gearhead with fantastic taste in cars. When I get it going and back on the road, I’d love to take it by and show Willie his old tin snail is back on the road and being appreciated.

After a few years, maybe very few, Target International had to stop selling 2CVs in America because the DOT began to crack down on the old pan/new everything else loophole that Target was using, and soon these cars were forbidden from being imported to the US once again.

I’m so excited about this thing, it’s distracting me. I find myself looking up details and period reviews about 2CVs, looking at the strange minimal dash layout and pouring over these owner’s manuals and eagerly awaiting when I can finally be driving this thing on the regular.

Fantastique!