Good morning to all of you out there in Greater Autopia! The Craigslist gods have smiled upon me today. I have stumbled upon, without actually looking for them, two wonderfully weird old French cars for us to look at. And one of them is one of my favorite sports cars of all time.
Yesterday was all about that decade referred to in that Killing Joke song, with two turbocharged fastbacks. It was a complete blowout in favor of the Dodge, which just goes to show how undesirable the wrong options can make a car. I imagine if the Merkur had had a manual transmission, the vote would have been just as lopsided the other way.
Me, I’m all about that Charger. I’ve been a fan of the L-body coupes since I was a kid. Actually buying this car would probably be a really stupid idea, but daydreaming doesn’t do any harm.
If you know anything about French cars, you know that they are just a little off-center from the rest of the automotive world. The French have their own way of doing things, and that’s just how it is, and if you don’t like it, mange tes morts. I guess it’s their prerogative; they did pretty much invent the automobile, after all. But if you look at French cars next to cars from other parts of the world, they do start to look strange. Take, for example, today’s choices: a van that looks like a garden shed on wheels, and a mid-engined coupe with a really bizarre seating arrangement inspired by a piece of furniture. Grab a croissant and a glass of petit verdot, get comfy, and let’s check them out.
1956 Citroën 2CV Fourgonnette – $7,000
Engine/drivetrain: 425 cc OHV air-cooled flat 2, four-speed manual, FWD
Location: Delaware, OH
Odometer reading: 77,000 miles (but odometer is broken, so who knows?)
Operational status: Runs and drives well
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that there is a Citroën 2CV in the Autopian family. Rescued from a back yard by Stephen Walter Gossin, the little yellow and black tin snail is now under the stewardship of weird-car connoisseur Jason Torchinsky. That 2CV is the standard four-door version, but here, for sale in a small town in Ohio, we have its utilitarian cousin, the Fourgonnette panel van. From the front doors forward, it’s a standard 2CV, but behind that, it’s basically a miniature Quonset hut.
This 2CV is older than Jason’s, and therefore has an even smaller engine. It displaces 425 cubic centimeters, and puts out – wait for it – twelve and a half horsepower. That’s just 5 cc and one horsepower more than my riding mower. Nevertheless, this cookie tin on wheels can hit 50 miles an hour, eventually. The seller bought it in a non-running state at an auction, and carefully brought it back to life. It runs and drives well now, though the seller says it can be a little stubborn to start.
The 2CV is famous for its simplicity, and being a cargo vehicle, this one is even simpler. Two seats, a steering wheel, and that funny umbrella-handle gearshift lever, and that’s about it. The seller redid the seats, and they look great. I don’t know if the famous basket-of-eggs trick works with the Fourgonnette, but I assume so.
It’s a little scruffy outside, but in a charming way. I see a little rust along the bottom of the van section, and some chips and flakes in the paint on the roof, but I think restoring it and repainting it would be a crime. It’s perfect the way it is. It has new tires – Michelin, of course – and includes some spare parts, tools, and literature.
1976 Matra-Simca Bagheera – $6,500
Engine/drivetrain: 1.5 liter OHV inline 4, four-speed manual, RWD
Location: Map shows Wood Dale, IL but ad title says Menominee, MI
Odometer reading: 56,000 miles
Operational status: Unknown; has just come out of a museum
There’s a good chance, unless you had a die-cast toy car of one like I did when you were a kid and looked it up out of curioslty, you might not know what you’re looking at. This is the product of a collaboration between Matra, a French aerospace company that also dabbled in sports cars, and Simca, which was the French arm of Chrysler Europe. It is also, to my knowledge, the only car named after a fictional black panther, or any fictional large cat, for that matter.
In the grand tradition of affordable sports cars like the Fiat X1/9, Pontiac Fiero, and Toyota MR2, the Bagheera is mid-engined, using the drivetrain from the front-wheel-drive Simca 1100 economy car, moved behind the seats. Both 1.3- and 1.5-liter engines were available; I’ll give this car the benefit of the doubt and assume it has the larger engine. Either way, a four-speed manual was the only transmission available. This one spent many years in a museum, and the seller isn’t clear about its running status, and I have no idea what museum it came from. I believe most museums maintain their vehicles in running condition, as long as it ran to begin with. So there’s a chance this thing is ready to hit the road – but check the dates on the tires just to be safe.
As if the mid-engine layout and the Rudyard Kipling-inspired name weren’t enough, the Bagheera has another surprise in store: three-across seating. The driver’s seat is separate, but the passenger’s seat is a doublewide, apparently based on a chair that Matra’s chief designer spotted in a shop in Paris. You can take two friends along for the ride, but they had better know each other really well, or else they will by the end of the ride. It’s in good shape, and I love the plaid upholstery. Why don’t cars have plaid seats anymore? Who do I talk to about that?
The Bagheera has a steel space frame with fiberglass-reinforced plastic body panels. Build quality was apparently spotty, but this one looks pretty good. It has cool snowflake-style alloy wheels and a Webasto-style cloth sunroof, both classic ’70s sports car cues. Though I promise you, if you show up to a classic sports-car gathering in this, you’ll turn everyone’s head – even the guy with the Lotus Elite.
Weird, as we like to say around here, is good. Uncommon cars with unusual features are just fun, and nobody does them better than the French. One of these is an icon, and the other is a footnote – but they’re both insanely cool, if you ask me. But which one appeals to you more? You’ve got a three-day weekend to mull it over. See you back here on Tuesday!
Given the tight integration of all the Stellantis brands, parts availability for either of these should be a cinch, right?
Those have to be the most epic window cranks I have ever seen.
Only one of those cars has window cranks, and it’s not the 2CV, it has folding windows.
Just look at those cranks’
My high school’s library had G.N. Georgano’s Encyclopedia, so I learned about the Bagheera. (It’s probably been since removed for being full of French deviants). I remember my joy at seeing one in the wild during one of my trips to France. And, of course, seeing it at the Lane. Speaking of which, what happened to the columns and comments from Rex Bennett at the Lane? Besides always being cool, if anyone could comment about getting Matra parts in the US …
as a French I’ll go for the 2CV… there’s still heaps of spare parts around and this one only need a bit of external love.
Oh and it can be converted into a camper 🙂
The Bagherra dates from before SIMCA ( Société Industrielle de Mécanique et de Construction Automobile, yes it was a time when automakeres where either well known name or a scary acronym ) was Chrysler, and at that time Matra was dabbling in… Almost everything (from Telecom equipment [They sold that to Nortel, Nortel-Matra Cellular, Matra Ericsson Telecomminucation], general public phones (I think I still have my MATRA RIP10 (it’s a phone with an answering machine) somewhere, aerospace (just because), subways (VAL, now part of Siemens) and more.
(Including dabbling in cars… like the Renault Espace)
The whole point is that the Bagherra is a low volume car, and sourcing parts might be a problem, especially for Eastpondians.
Chrysler acquired SIMCA well before this car was made.
I checked in Wikipedia, and much to my surprise it turns out one of my art friends in the 70s, Johnny Pigozzi, father started SIMCA.
This was very close. I love weird ass French cars but went with the parts availablity stateside for the 2CV based Fourgonnette. It also would be a great candidate( to parrot Andrew Martin’s reply) for a cool mobile bakery/book/craft sales vehicle. I could easily see this at a craft festival.
The Matra-Simca looks super cool. I have no frame of reference on how these drive or parts availability.
Fourgonnette all day for me.
I have a dream of one day running a bakery and peddling my wares at farmers’ markets. My adorable little 2CV Fourgonnette would brim with wicker quivers of baguette, slab stacks of pain de mie, and mounds of miche.
It should be noted that in the prototype 2CVs the seats were hammocks hung from the roof by wires, so the lux Bauhause chairs are a big step up.
Both, if I weren’t about to move 2800 miles.
The inability of moving my enormous pile of stuff in the snail is somewhere between fuggetaboutit and a forgone conclusion, so the name fits even if my stuff wouldn’t.
The Bagheera is also a bucket list item.
My Porsche 914 with option code M570 is also a mid engine three seater, a distinction it shares with this and the McLaren F1. Option M570 procures a tiny seat cushion and a lap belt. Apparently it has something to to with taxes. My uncle ordered it so he could remove the passenger seat and still carry a passenger.
He did that so he could install one of these in the car.
https://youtu.be/-yGjV0GiQEI
I think at the time that computer cost twice as much as the 914/6
He was using it to do rally navigation calculations while driving, which was technically against the rules so he would take along a cat or small child as the”navigator”
I’m always partial for a discrete proposal for a menage a trois.
I’ll take the cat. Can I swap a K20 into it?
Had to go fourgonette because looking at those seats of the Simcs
Makes me thing economy seats on Spirit Airlines are more roomy
**Repeatedly smashes non-existent both button.**
Let’s clarify a couple things though:
“If you know anything about French cars, you know that they are just a little off-center from the rest of the automotive world.”
Incorrect. The rest of the world has right hand drive for GB and their remaining rag tag colonies, and left hand drive. The French drive all over the place. Sure they would prefer a central seating position, but as for a ‘little off centre’, pish, “WE ARE THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE!”
“This 2CV is older than Jason.”
FIFY…
Yes! BOTH!
What is going on with the seats in both of these cars? The 2CV looks like someone just threw in a couple of cheap patio chairs and called it good. Are they even secured to the car? I can’t wrap my head around the contours of the Bagheera’s seat bottom surfaces. It seems like those ridges under the mid-thigh would do bad things to blood circulation in the legs. What were they thinking? I do love the plaid, though.
They were thinking basic economic efficiency. Moving lawn chairs were a huge upgrade to walking in postwar Europe where materials were scarce. My friend who used to fly ultralights called them the 2CV of the skies.
You could probably resell the 2CV seats to a furniture collector for more than you paid for the car.
The seats in the Chrysler Imperial, actually most 1930s Chryslers, look remarkably similar.
The seats in the Matra are that way because you’re sitting very low and your feet are only a few inches below your butt with your knees bent. Without that contour it would be really uncomfortable. My biggest complaint about seats in airliners is that there’s no thigh support so you just sort of keep sliding out of it for six hours.