In June I drove my 1982 Renault Le Car to that mythical “farm in the country” where it can roam free. With all the other free French cars.

Actually it wasn’t quite free. I got a few bucks for the mountain of Franco-spares that went with the car.

original ad campaign

Click and Clack named the Le Car the sixth worst car of the millennium. Ours lasted almost as long as they did, and cost far less than our local NPR station pays per year for Car Talk programming. If it was truly the sixth worst car ever, that just shows how good even bad cars are. Tom and Ray did a bit on the show once about French car ownership and displaced misery: “If a man were to own two Peugeots, he’d never catch a cold.” Now my French-car misery shield is gone.

It never failed to start, even when the temperatures hovered around zero. The Le Car was the last car sold in America with a manual choke, which may have had something to do with it. The Renault got through snow as well as my 78 full-sized 4WD Ford Bronco, whose massive gear-drive transfer case dwarfed the Le Car’s 1.4 liter four cylinder engine and transmission combined.

Even more importantly, the Le Car never failed to elicit smiles from drivers and pedestrians of a certain age (basically anyone old enough to have been sentient when Le Cars were new). Even during the silly “freedom fries” years, people couldn’t help but smile at the narrow, funny-looking car (I added European headlights, which enhanced the funny-looking quotient considerably). It caused a wreck in the Home Depot parking lot when two rubber-neckers backing up at the same time stared at the weird car instead of their mirrors.

Perhaps even hard-core Francophobes somehow knew that the French would never exploit and bastardize their native tongue as a cheap marketing tool to woo Yankee consumers. It took an American car salesman to do that, when the Renault R5 proved nearly impossible to move from US car lots, and “Le Car” was born. Or maybe it’s just nerdy. Next to a Le Car, the first-generation New Beetle radiates pure Teutonic macho.

Our Le Car was already starting to rust when we dragged it out of a friend’s yard in Atlanta in 1995, but a new clutch and a brake job was all it took to make it roadworthy. It cost me $300 and an untitled Yamaha XS400 motorcycle. Cats had been living in it, and on damp days our noses were reminded of that history. The huge cloth sunroof could be deployed with one hand, and the supple suspension felt a lot more expensive than it was.

Great sunroof-to-roof ratio

When I worked for Michelin, we had a saying: “The French don’t imitate anybody, and nobody imitates the French.” The Le Car embodied this in spades, and as a result was a great conversation-starter the few times I had to have it serviced by someone besides me. Three lug nuts retain each wheel. “You trust those three lug nuts going down the highway?” a tire-store grunt asked me once. There wasn’t really a way to add a fourth, so yes.

Technically, the Le Car was mid-engined, longitudinal, and front-wheel-drive. The motor was jammed up against the firewall, and the transmission bolted on the front. This generated lots of head scratching from muffler shop guys when the car was on the lift. The wheelbase on one side of the car was longer than on the other, to allow the torsion bars that were the rear suspension to lie beside each other. The rear pop-out windows were glued to the hinges, and eventually the French glue failed, making the pop-out feature complete. We found a pair of bolt-through windows from an earlier year R5 in Puerto Rico. Before the Internet, finding obscure French car parts was time-consuming. Rust ate more of the tasty French steel over the years, and the suspension bushings rotted out.

The guy that bought our Le Car is the other Renault freak in town, and he’s upped his game since the last time I talked to him. We filled up the Le Car and his Fuego (!) with spare parts, lots of them, seats, radiators, wheels, boxes of NOS, etc. and I took one last drive with the top back. In a straight line, the A-arm bushings were so whipped that the wheels tucked enough to squeal.

He brought me home in this, his 1971 R4, assembled in Mexico. Crude as a dumpster and almost as quick.

Crude but effective. You couldn’t hear the radio if it had one.

He also had a 1985 Super 5 from Poland. So there’s no better place for our Le Car to retire, I guess.

Maybe after a suitable period of mourning, I can hunt Ebay for an R8 Gordini. Wouldn’t want to catch a cold.