A Tale Of Two 2CVs

My one abiding memory of travelling in an original 2CV involved being driven around the French-Swiss Alps in snowy conditions by some drugs-running lunatic trying to avoid heavily armed Swiss Border Police.

My elder brother and I were hitchhiking through France en route to Annecy, which lies on the Northern tip of Lake Annecy (though the Swiss call the lake something else) about 22 miles south of Geneva.

At the start of our terrifying ride, we had no idea what we were getting into, and I don’t just mean the Swiss border patrol situation that was to come further down the road. As it was a very cold winter trip, we were just happy to get into a car. Any car would have done, even a Trabant.

It was only as we approached Switzerland that we became aware of our driver’s stock in trade. At one point he pulled over, a mile or two from the border and confessed that he was running drugs and needed to take a back route through the mountains to avoid being arrested. He then set off at a hell of a pace around a series of tight twisties that had my brother and I almost puking our guts up.

The corrugated French umbrella, as it was affectionately known, had the scary habit of leaning at forty-five degrees at every twist and turn. The entire time it felt like it would actually topple over, if not at the next hairpin then the one after. Finally, our camel pulled over and pointed across some fields to where Geneva lay. Little did we know that he was pointing us towards certain arrest by overzealous armed Swiss border guards.

As he sped off, we began our trek in the direction he pointed out. After a mile or so we came to a road and saw a small shop where we thought we could buy a Coca Cola and a bar of chocolate.

As I handed over the last of the few French Francs I had left to the attractive, middle-aged female commerçant, I felt a couple of prods in my back. At the same time, my brother said from behind, “Ryan, turn around very slowly mate, you have a rifle prodding you in your back!”

From the shop, we were frog-marched at gunpoint back down the road and accused of illegally crossing the border, which was basically the white centre line in the middle of the cold rural road. We were ordered to step over the line, back into France, to be dealt with by the French, which took all of two minutes. When we crossed back over the line into Switzerland we were hauled into a Swiss security cabin. What followed was not a pleasant experience since it included an anal inspection, certain that was where we were hiding our stash of cannabis, or whatever. They found nothing. After half an hour we were let go and made our way down the mountain into Geneva. The rest of the journey was relatively uneventful, I am happy to report.

‘The Citroen 2CV was an economy car with an air-cooled engine that was mounted in the front and drove the front wheels

Conceived by Citroën Vice-President Pierre Boulanger the 2CV had a combination of innovative engineering and straightforward, utilitarian bodywork. It featured an overall low cost of ownership, simplicity of maintenance, an easily serviced air-cooled engine and minimal fuel consumption. In addition, it had been designed to cross a freshly ploughed field with a basket full of eggs on the passenger's seat without breaking them,

A 1953 technical review in Autocar described "the extraordinary ingenuity of this design, which is undoubtedly the most original since the Model T Ford".^[16] In 2011, The Globe and Mail called it a "car like no other".^[17] The motoring writer L. J. K. Setright described the 2CV as "the most intelligent application of minimalism ever to succeed as a car",^[18]and a car of "remorseless rationality".^[19] (Wikipedia).

My personal view of the car was that it was just a tad too quirky. It looked and drove like nothing else I had ever seen or driven. For me, it seemed that those most likely to buy the car were people who weren’t afraid to be seen as somebody uniquely individual.

The people who I personally knew who had the car were liberal-leaning mid-life, midwives or kindergarten teachers, Mumsy type of people. Of course, that was a narrow-minded view, it must have been since Citroen sold a grand total of nine million 2CVs.

Looking back, that previous view of mine was somewhat misguided, to say the least. These days you can buy a virtually new 2CV which retains all the old charm of the original yet can come as an economical EV. For sure, that is not the only update. Click on the hyperlink below to get the full story.

• As of today over 2,000 original 2CVs are still on the roads of the UK.

• In terms of second-hand market value, you can buy a 2CV for between 15K and 26K British pounds.

• You can buy a virtually new 2CV for as little as 29K pounds at…

  Buy 'New'

  Electric 2CV

  https://2cev.co.uk › buy-new