I had a customer buy some headlamp adaptor rings off me yesterday and he told me it was for an old Citroen. In our conversation he told me he owned several Citroens and a few Panhards as well. Not knowing anything about Panhards and very little about Citroens I looked them up on Wikipedia and found that both these French carmakers made some very interesting and cool cars. This got me thinking I should start a thread where we could post pics and links pertaining to obscure but cool old cars so we could broaden our horizons a bit and get to see and learn about some cool old cars. I'm going to start it off with a few Citroens, a Panhard and a Deutch .

Some of the Citroens I'm posting would not be considered "obscure" to most Europeans. The 2CV and DS models were very popular and common over in Europe. You still see lots of the 2CVs on the road today over there.

First off here's a 1958 Citroen Radar



Here's an '87 or '88 Citroen 2CV (yes I've got the year right !). They were made from 1948 - 1990 and didn't change much body-wise.



Here's a cool red Citroen DS Convertible. Not sure of year. The body was styled by Bertoni.



And here are some Panhard 24 CTs. The red one is a '66 and the green one is a '64





Here's the back end of a CT 24



I'll post some pics of some other cars later...

This is a Deutsch-Bonnet (DB). Not sure of the model or the year.
DB sounds like it should be a German make but it's actually French.



Here's a super cool 1959 DB Lemans racer:

I WANT ONE OF THESE !!



Here's the back end of that car:

There was a Panhard dealer in Edmonton. I know there is guy I've chatted with a few times (big time collector...) that has 6 or 7.... not much left of most of them. Last time I was between jobs I spent part of a day helping him rearrange one of this three rented storage yards by towing them around with a 41 Chrysler flat-8-inline with fluid drive and a cracked exhaust manifold.

The Panhard were designed for full aluminum construction and were desperately underpowered when financial realities caused them to revert to steel for the majority of the production run.
The ones shown are not the standard 58-61 cars that were imported into Canada in some quantity.

No fuses, one NHRA-style battery shut off mounted in reach of the driver.

A very modern FWD configuration with a rack&pinion. Looking at one closely makes you wonder how much Issigonis deserves the credit he gets.

FOR SHAME!!! Besides, Issigonis didn't just earn it by virtue of the FWD layout...

Once a Mini guy... err... sorry.

Seriously, though, what about his Alvis project?, from everything written the thing was an abomination, worst of Brit, Tatra, Citroen...and stuff even those companies knew better...