When Gas Supplies Ran Low, Some French Drivers Turned To Coal-Powered Cars

During World War II, gasoline for civilians was in short supply. France was far from the only European country that turned to coal to run automobiles.

You think filling up your tank is a pain now? Now imagine it's World War II, you're in occupied France, and gasoline is about as common as a German soldier with a sense of humor. The occupying force has first dibs on all the fuel they want, leaving you with ration cards as useful as a used tissue. What do you do when you need to get your car, probably a Citroën, down the road? Well, it's obvious. You bolt two giant, hideous chemical reactors to the fender and start shoveling in coal.

These monstrosities were called gazogènes, and they were a brilliant yet frankly awful answer to a crippling problem. This wasn't just a French phenomenon, either. By the end of the war, nearly a million of these things were chugging across Europe, with Germany actually the biggest user. The gazogène became the ultimate sign of the times, turning a symbol of freedom into a rolling declaration that you couldn't afford black market gas, or wouldn't risk dealing with it. It was a step backward to keep society from taking a leap in reverse.

Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle Archives/Wikimedia Commons

So how in the world do you run a car on coal? A gazogène is basically a barbecue from hell strapped to your car. Instead of grilling a steak, you're intentionally starving a coal fire of oxygen in a big steel reactor. You get it incredibly hot until the fuel itself starts to break down and essentially weaponize its smoke. This process, called gasification, forces the coal to release a cocktail of flammable gases, mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The gas is then piped over to the engine's intake to be burned like gasoline.

Simple, right? Not really. The gas produced was, as you can imagine, filthy. Before it could get anywhere near the engine's precious internals, it had to be cooled and forced through filters usually packed with cork to strip out the ash and tar. Even when it worked, the system was hobbled because it used plain old air. Since air is 78% useless non-flammable nitrogen, the resulting fuel was massively diluted. These cars lost a third of their power right off the bat — on a good day. It was a fascinating, if flawed, piece of engineering, not unlike some of the other wild alternative fuel ideas that have popped up.

Prova MO/Wikimedia Commons

Living with a gazogène-powered car was, to put it mildly, a complete nightmare. Forget turning a key and driving off. The daily ritual began with a 30-minute warm-up process where you had to light the coal and wait for the burner to get hot enough to produce a usable gas. The reward for your patience and diligence? A car that was now one-third less powerful if the coal was burning just right. Even then, you could only go about 30 miles before you had to stop and refuel.

And then there were the dangers. The main component of your fuel was carbon monoxide, an odorless, colorless, toxic gas — you know, the same reason you have those detectors in your house. Any leak has the opportunity to silently kill you. Plus, you were essentially driving around with a high-temperature furnace strapped to your car. 

It's no surprise that as soon as the war ended and gasoline started flowing again, these contraptions were unceremoniously ripped off and scrapped. Their legacy lives on today mostly among collectors and, curiously, as a still-viable solution in fuel-starved North Korea. These bizarre relics of automotive history are a reminder that when things get tough, sometimes the only way to move forward is to embrace something that feels, in every possible way, like a huge step back.