SO LONG . . . HELLO . . . : DEUX CHEVAUX : France Has Ceased Production of the Ultimate in Minimalist Transportation, but the 2Cv Lives on in the Third World--and Texas

It was in 1956 that Ernie Schorsch first encountered one of France’s motorized sardine cans with the peel-back roof. While hitchhiking his way down the Rhone Valley that foot-loose summer, one of the odd little vehicles stopped for the 19-year-old American.

“I thought right away of those toy cars we used to pedal as kids,” Schorsch, now a carpeting executive in Toledo, Ohio, recalled the other day. “There were two British gals and a guy from Algeria and all their stuff, but somehow they made room in back for me and my stuff, and off we went.

“Not very fast, mind you,” he added with a chuckle, “but it got us there!”

It got us there might well serve as the motto of the distinctive and dully gray mini-car that French motorists affectionately call the Deux Chevaux --or “two horses”--after its minuscule two-cylinder engine. By the time Schorsch encountered his first Deux Chevaux, the homely little car was already in its seventh season as a prime mover of the French masses.

The Deux Chevaux, or 2CV as it is often abbreviated, had been an instant hit with France’s war-starved population from its debut in 1949. The minimalist 2CV answered a need in France at that time that was as fundamental as the three-bedroom tract house in the United States was for returning GIs and their war-delayed young families.

But sales of the 2CV peaked in 1966 and have since slowly and steadily declined. Finally, after nearly 40 years and more than 5 million Deux Chevaux, the makers of the little car--now a merged entity called the Peugeot-Citroen Group--stopped production. The end came this year as three models--each painted in France’s national colors of red, white and blue--rolled out of the century-old Citroen plant in suburban Levallois.

While Citroen will continue to make a few 2CVs at a plant in Portugal for Third World markets, and a Texan entrepreneur plans to produce a knock-off version in Houston this summer, the end of production in France symbolizes, as few other contemporary events could, France’s transformation from a postwar economic basket case to a modern, post-industrial society.

“It was the success of the French economy that killed the Deux Chevaux,” said Laurence Wylie of Harvard University, an authority on French society whose acquaintance with the little cars reaches back to the beginning. “In 1950, the French economy had only begun to recover from the war, and the only cars I saw in the Vaucluse (a rural region in southeastern France) were old and broken down and barely held together by bailing wire.”

Traded Up Cars

Pent-up demand for affordable transportation--particularly in the French hinterlands--quickly outstripped Citroen’s production capability. Almost immediately, there was a two-year wait for delivery. Top priority, determined by a detailed questionnaire administered to prospective buyers, went to country doctors, rural clergy, farmers and others dependent on a cheap and reliable vehicle to make their rounds and earn a living.

“It was a very poor time--one that was to persist for a good 10 years,” retired French journalist Paul Gerin recalled in an interview. “The possession of a Deux Chevaux was a dream for many.” Gerin was able to buy his first 2CV in 1954--mainly as a favor from a dealer-friend.

But even before sales peaked at 168,384 cars, the French economic success had begun to move away from such austere souvenirs of poorer times past. As France continued to prosper, owners of the Deux Chevaux began to trade up, relegating the little car to backup status as a family’s second car--what the French call la voiture de madame . Once madame began to trade up in the 1970s, however, the sales decline accelerated.

At the end, fewer than 14,000 of the little cars were sold annually, Jacques Calvet, Citroen’s chairman, said in announcing the shutdown 39 years after the first 2CV came on the market.

From the outset, Citroen indulged in no flights of promotional fancy. The introductory sales brochure, printed in somber sepia, portrayed the vehicle in appropriately Spartan terms: “We wanted to put an economical means of transportation within the reach of the public. To do this, we eliminated all that was not indispensable.”

That, in fact, had been the marching order handed down 14 years earlier by Pierre-Jules Boulanger, then president of Citroen--which in those Depression years had only just been saved from bankruptcy by the Michelin tire company. Boulanger saw an untapped market in the mostly unmotorized rural provinces of France, and he ordered his designers to produce “four wheels under an umbrella.” But, Boulanger added, “the car, fully loaded with eggs, must be able to cross a field without breaking a single one.”

Motor of a Lawn Mower

The company shrouded the austere project in secrecy under the code letters TPV . These stood for toute petite voiture --roughly, teeny, tiny car. Some 250 prototypes of the TPV were assembled and tested before World War II and the ensuing years of Nazi occupation. During that painful period, Citroen engineers destroyed all but one of the prototypes, apparently to keep them from falling into enemy hands.

Gerin recalled that Citroen aimed to build a car capable of traveling at 36 miles an hour over the roughest roads, “while transporting four persons--or two plus a calf or a pig weighing 110 pounds. The original model had an engine whose pistons displaced just 425 cubic centimeters--the motor of a lawn mower!” he said.

The car was designed so that the owner could make all necessary repairs, whether replacement of the fenders, the motor or brakes, Gerin said.

“The body was rather, well, summary ,” he said, choosing the word with respectful care, “but the car had the advantage of having a sliding fabric top that could be rolled back all the way to the rear license plate.” The lower half of the window on the driver’s side could be folded up to give arm signals, he added, and the gasoline supply was measured by a dipstick attached to the filler cap. The earliest model also had but one headlight, a manually operated windshield wiper--just a single blade--and offered buyers a choice of any color as long as it was medium gray.

Sturdily Built

But the little car’s chief virtue was its durability.

While on assignment in the Sahara in the 1950s for the daily newspaper La Voix du Nord of Lille, Gerin said, he was astounded to see that the oil workers drilling wells at Hassi-Ressaoud and Edgele were driving the little front-wheel-drive cars. They favored them “for very practical reasons,” he discovered. “The air-cooled motor needed no water, and when the car got stuck in the sand its lightness--about 400 kilograms (less than 900 pounds)--was very helpful in extricating it.” In the car’s earliest days, automobiles were new to many of France’s rural inhabitants, the 2CV’s primary intended market. Lacking motoring experience, some of these drivers put many a Deux Chevaux through the severest of tests, according to a company history of the car.

One farmer reportedly drove more than 600 miles without shifting out of first gear, not knowing how. And a hotel operator in the Camargue region, at the mouth of the Rhone, drove 60,000 miles without changing the oil that came with his new car.

Not surprisingly, according to Wylie, the Harvard expert on French society, France has simply outgrown those days and the need for the Deux Chevaux.

“The French people themselves don’t do the hard work any more,” he explained. “It’s the immigrants who collect the garbage and sweep the streets, and the immigrants don’t drive cars so much. So the market among them for the Deux Chevaux isn’t very good--or at least hasn’t been.”

But as Calvet noted in his brief valedictory on Feb. 28 at Levallois, the French market for mini-cars has all but dried up--much as had the West German market for Volkswagen Beetles a few years before. As with the Beetle, which is still being assembled outside Germany, however, the Deux Chevaux continues to eke out an existence abroad--notably, in Mongualte, Portugal, and in, of all places, Houston.

Terry Keeton in May transformed his 2CV Workshop into Sun Automobiles of North America, where he intends to begin production this summer of an updated, comfortable version of a Deux Chevaux that meets current U.S. safety and pollution standards. Keeton emphasized that his company’s Suns have no connection at all with Citroen, which never adapted the little cars for the U.S. market (nor for that matter of those, closer to home, of Switzerland, Austria and Scandinavia).

And that marketing decision was a mistake, Keeton insists, on the part of Citroen, whose lineup of cars has always enjoyed a reputation in automotive circles for advanced and sometimes audacious engineering (including adjustable hydraulic suspension in some models).

“You can talk to the 10 million people who have owned or driven a 2CV, and they’ll all tell you they love it,” Keeton said. “The 2CV is perfection! It rides better than a Cadillac. It goes around curves sports cars can’t make without backing up. It handles beautifully.”

A touch of Texan extravagance aside, Keeton’s words pretty much describe the experience of Joe Wu, a network analyst in Los Angeles. Wu’s maroon and black 1985 model, which can be glimpsed tooling around downtown most work days, was built for about $4,300 from a kit assembled by a company in Hollywood that is, he added, no longer in business.

“I’m always getting stopped by people who wonder what I’m driving,” Wu said. “It’s a great conversation piece.” Wu said he first encountered the 2CV not abroad but in the movies. The little car made appearances in several U.S. films, including George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” and the James Bond thriller, “For Your Eyes Only.”

Jacques Laude, owner of Challenger Motors on Melrose Avenue, where Wu and a handful of other Angeleno owners have their 2CVs serviced, called the Deux Chevaux extremely reliable. “It’s a practical car,” Laude said. “My customers have had no serious troubles.”

Those values are still appreciated in the countries where production continues, Wylie said. Portugal’s economy, for example, is about where France’s was three decades ago, especially in terms of auto ownership, he said. In the United States, on the other hand, Keeton expects to find a small but ready market for his knockoff version among those trendy Americans ever on the lookout for the next Chardonnay, pricey gadget . . . or an offbeat car that’s really fun to drive.

Consequently, Gerin may be correct when he predicts that the world--and even France--is far from seeing its last new Deux Chevaux. “It appears that the (car) will wind up like those old actors and actresses whose farewell performances stretch out over 20 years.

“Each time the end is announced,” he said, “orders increase.”

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