Salut les copains! Jason Toon here with another Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell. I'm not a car guy, but even I have noticed how there's one country that seems to sell a lot of cars in Europe but none in America.
The year is 1959. Foreign cars make up a small sliver of auto sales in the USA. But the best-selling import of the year looks poised to change that. Its styling: compact and quirky. Its price: low. Its marketing: clever and distinctive. And its country of origin, while decimated by World War II, is undergoing a manufacturing boom that promises to remake its national image as a modern industrial powerhouse.
That country was France. That car was the Renault Dauphine. And it would certainly establish a firm reputation for French cars in the American mind - just not in the way Renault had hoped.
Not pictured: the other four Dauphines it took to get all those kids there.
Le Car Hot
Since the three Renault brothers founded the company in 1899, it had been front of the pack among French carmarkers. By 1951, after two World Wars and a Great Depression, French workers were seeing rising standards of living, and French industry was rapidly growing in both capability and confidence. A new car was called for, to meet both the increasing expectations of the local population and the standards of lucrative potential export markets like the United States.
Renault, now nationalized and owned by the French government, spent five years developing an affordable, lightweight, easy-to-drive car at its facilities in the hilariously named town of Lardy. The Dauphine's distinctive style à la française streamlined the "pontoon" or "bathtub" look of '40s cars and added unique touches like air intake vents next to the rear doors and a horizontal spare tire compartment below the front bumper. Interiors eventually came in a variety of midcentury textile patterns and color schemes. Like I said, I'm not a car guy, but if they still looked like this, maybe I would be.
Shut up and take my francs.
The Dauphine's urban utility and modern yet Old World vibe touched the zeitgeist. Renault would go on to sell millions of units around the world. In the United States, it was colorfully marketed as "Le Car Hot", a European vacation on wheels. Its $1645 price tag came in well below the $2000 or so that the US carmakers charged for their economy models. By 1959, Renault overtook its biggest rival, Volkswagen, for the top spot in US import sales. The future of foreign cars looked French.
You have to be French to get away with using this many fonts.
There were troubling signs, though, that the honeymoon between the Dauphine and American drivers wouldn't last long. The compact, easy-handling Dauphine made a lot of sense for French conditions: short trips on narrow streets in a mild Continental climate. But harder driving on wide American highways in more extreme weather exposed the car's limitations.
"The first time you climb into a Renault Dauphine and slam the door," wrote Sports Cars Illustrated in 1956, "you will hear not a solid classic thud but a metallic clang that will remind you of every underpowered economy car you've ever driven." Road tests found that the Dauphine took an agonizing 37 seconds to go from 0 to 60.
What's more, as it approached its anemic top speed of 72 MPH, the Dauphine's famous easy handling turned not so easy. "The need for concentration on the controls reached a level that does not exist at lower speeds," Sports Cars Illustrated continued. "The car can be bumped significantly off its course by gusty cross winds, and surface irregularities that normally have no meaning become factors to contend with." In other words, when the highway gets tough, the little Dauphine gets thrown around.
France vs. Germany, as imagined by American ad agencies.
Its signature lightweight steel construction is also to blame for the bane of Dauphine owners: rust. The flimsy non-structural panels started to rot within a few years even in moderate environments, never mind the slush and salt of a Minnesota winter. "If you stood beside it, you could actually hear [it] rusting," joked Time magazine in 2007 when it named the Dauphine as one of its 50 Worst Cars of All Time.
A growing reputation for unreliability - shared with other French and Italian cars of the time - was exacerbated by a lack of parts and dealerships. Simple repairs would take weeks. Renault ran into the same chicken-and-egg problem that stymied other carmakers: you can't sell a lot of cars without a robust service network, but it's hard to build a robust service network until you sell a lot of cars.
But the cultural match was the biggest question mark. In a country where the best-selling cars were gas-guzzling domestic yachts on wheels like the Ford Thunderbird and the Cadillac Coupe de Ville, would the efficient but flyweight Dauphine survive once the novelty wore off?
Le Car Cold
Bernard Hanon, a 29-year-old whiz kid responsible for Renault's American marketing of the Dauphine, was asking the same questions. He'd done his postgraduate work at Columbia University in New York and so had some familiarity with the American market. In 1961 he sent a report up the chain of command emphasizing the Dauphine's vulnerabilities. But it was ignored, found years later in an executive's desk drawer.
Hanon was right. There was only room in the American market of the time for one cheap, funny-looking little European car with a rear engine, and the Dauphine's terrible word of mouth meant that its primacy over the Volkswagen Beetle was short-lived. Renault tried replacing it with somewhat more solidly built, powerful models from 1963 on, but it was too little, too late. By 1970, as VW was peaking with almost 300,000 cars sold in the US, Renault bottomed out at just 5,000.
Renault would take one more bite at the American apple later that decade, this time under the leadership of that same Bernard Hanon. Repeated gas crises had made fuel efficiency a big selling point. Americans were now considering cars from Japan, of all places. With all they'd learned from their first failure, surely this time Renault would conquer America.
French car, English sheepdog, American lawn.
The company consummated an uneasy merger with American Motor Corporation, acquiring a readymade dealer and service network. A saturation ad campaign rebranded the Renault 5 as Le Car. They added new North America-specific models like the Alliance and Encore manufactured in the US at AMC plants. If America didn't want French cars, what about French American cars?
Le Car, Au Revoir
Again, there was a honeymoon. Again, it was brief. (These weren't great years for American American cars.) Renault-AMC's US sales peaked at 208,000 in 1984 before tumbling to 65,000 just two years later. By 1987, as Renault's wider operations were losing money, they sold off their interest in AMC to Chrysler. That was fin for Renault in America. Its French competitors Citroën had already left the market in 1974, and Peugeot would follow in 1991.
Bugatti is the only French maker that continues to sell cars in the United States, and they're not exactly a mass-market brand. Plus, with that Italian name, I didn't even know they were French until I wrote this piece.
Will les marques de voitures françaises ever make a comeback in America? Never say jamais, but the Dauphine-driven stereotype of French cars as flimsy, anemic little curiosities is awfully entrenched, coinciding as it does with Americans' effete stereotypes of France in general. Legacy national identities for car brands seem to be more and more fixed as their actual operations merge into the same global megacorporations. German cars are well-engineered, Japanese cars are efficient, Swedish cars are safe, Italian cars are stylish, and French cars are, well, French - even if they're all made in the same city in China.
And the old difficulties of getting established in the huge US market have only gotten more formidable. Renault sells 2 million cars a year in 128 countries, so it hardly seems worth the hassle. America is likely to remain just a bittersweet memory of a long-lost flirtation. C'est la vie. We'll always have Lardy.
Dauphine shown actual size.
I have a firm belief that almost everyone’s second car should essentially be a souped up golf cart. I’ve got a list of cars that may someday make it to America, but agonizingly still haven’t, year after year. The Microlino Lite, Citroën Ami, Fiat Topolino, Opel Rocks-e, Renault Twizy, and more. Someday. What’s your dream import (of any kind of product, not just cars) that hasn’t quite made it to America yet? Let us know in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Enjoy the smooth suspension and bold styling of these high-performance, precision engineered Shoddy Goods stories:
Renault's Alliance was Motor Trend Car of the Year in the US. We had one. I think it lasted from 1982-1987. I remember the turn stalk would flash in both directions when you turned left or right. I didn't know what was a Euro thing becuase my VW also did that in the 90s -- one light to tell you your turn signal was on.
Like the recent attempt by Fiat which also failed, I still feel like you can point to one company, now called Stellantis, that really is a total disaster. They could have done well with Fiats and Alfas if they cared, but all they want to sell are Jeeps that get ratings in the 30s on Consumer Reports.
Oh well.