Allen Park, Michigan, is home to the giant Uniroyal Tire. Avoca, Iowa, has the Volkswagen Beetle Spider, and Alliance, Nebraska, has Carhenge. France has a car-themed sight next to a road as well, though it’s lesser-known: There’s a Citroën 2CV roadside attraction towering above highway A711 near Lempdes.
Lempdes is located on the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand, where Michelin was founded in 1889 and is still headquartered, but the connection between the 2CV-turned-statue and the tire brand is less direct than it might seem. Crucially, this link hasn’t been proven; It’s the subject of debate among historians and fans.
Let’s hit rewind for a moment. André Citroën founded the carmaker that bears his name in 1919 and filed for bankruptcy in December 1934 after experimenting with numerous bold ideas. Some worked, like the hugely innovative Traction Avant released in April 1934 and the all-steel B14 unveiled in 1926. Others didn’t, costing the brand a substantial amount of money along the way, including the V8-powered version of the Traction Avant that came stunningly close to production and the numerous off-roaders fitted with tracks.
Michelin, one of Citroën’s biggest creditors, took over the brand in 1935, saving the company and about 250,000 jobs as a result. Pierre Michelin became president of Citroën in July 1935, shortly after André Citroën died, and he appointed another Michelin executive, named Pierre-Jules Boulanger, as vice-president. Boulanger stepped up to president of Citroën after Michelin’s death in December 1937.
Here’s where Lempdes enters the picture. According to the city hall, Boulanger had a revelation while people-watching at its farmer’s market. Looking around him, he envisioned a small, basic car that was cheap to buy, cheap to run, and cheap to fix. He got home (hopefully after buying Saint-Nectaire cheese) and later gave the following assignment to the head of Citroën’s research and development department.
“I’d like your department to look into creating a car that can carry two farmers wearing work shoes and 50 kilos of potatoes or a small barrel, at a speed of 60 kph, while using three liters of gasoline to travel 100 kilometers.” He added that the car should tackle unpaved roads with ease, that an inexperienced driver should feel comfortable driving it, and that it should cost about a third as much as a Traction Avant 11CV. Finally, his last request had a lasting influence on the 2CV: What the car looked like really didn’t matter.
Additional demands, like a total weight of no more than 770 pounds and at least three forward gears, later entered the equation. Keeping costs in check was difficult, even in an era when cars remained largely experimental and the market was not yet shaped by regulations. Engineers considered building the structure with wood, which wasn’t uncommon in the 1930s. They also looked into keeping fireflies in a jar attached to the body to replace the parking lights. The logic, wild as it might seem, is that the bugs would allow them to build a car without a battery and tick the “lighter” and “cheaper” boxes on their list.
Citroën called the car très petite voiture (TPV) internally, which translates to “very small car” in French, and planned to unveil it at the 1939 Paris Auto Show. French authorities homologated the TPV on August 28, 1939. Citroën started building 250 pre-series cars in Levallois right after, and France joined the United Kingdom in declaring war on Germany on September 3, 1939. The annual Paris auto show, which was scheduled to open its doors to the popping of flashbulbs on October 5, 1939, was canceled.
The rest of the story is well known: The TPV was hidden during the war, redesigned, and released in 1948 as the 2CV. Precisely 5,114,969 examples had been built by the time production ended on July 27, 1990, including 1,246,335 vans, and it allegedly all started when Boulanger moseyed through his local market.
Back to the present: It’s hard to miss the 2CV, which was likely built in the late 1950s, if you’re driving down the A711. Finished in blue, it’s bolted to a curved metal pedestal that reads “Lempdes – the 2CV’s cradle,” facing traffic with its front end pointed down. It looks like it just landed. The plot of land it’s on is between guardrails, but you can walk up to it for a closer look by taking the exit, parking on a sidewalk, and hopping over. It’s been perched there for so long that the younger locals don’t remember a time without it; It sounds like the monument was inaugurated in 1998 to celebrate the 2CV’s 60th birthday.
I’m glad it’s there, regardless of whether the market tale is true, but I wouldn’t be telling you the full story if I didn’t mention this: It’s a lot prettier from a distance, at 90 kph, than when you’re staring right up at it.
The emblem riveted to the grille is fake, the rear lights are home-made, some of the suspension is missing, there’s no engine or transmission, and there’s quite a bit of rust on the floors. The paint is in terrible shape, too, which isn’t surprising considering this car bakes in the sun all day. It’s been repainted several times since becoming a roadside attraction, sometimes due to vandalism, like a 2009 incident where it was covered in pink paint.
Fittingly, it’s on Michelin tires. Imagine the public outcry if it were displayed with cheaper Nankang tires!
You can’t exactly get it down with a crane, pop a battery in it, and take it for a drive, then, and that’s fine. It’d be unfortunate to sacrifice a gorgeous, survivor-spec 2CV that has never been restored to use as a roadside attraction. The car has clearly been embellished; We might never know if the story was as well.
It’s not too far-fetched to believe that Boulanger came up with the idea of a car to put rural France on wheels while visiting a farmer’s market. I’d be more skeptical if someone told me the 2CV sprouted in his mind at a swank hotel on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. But, it’s also not too far-fetched to argue Michelin wanted a people’s car to monetize its investment in Citroën by selling more tires. Remember: The 2CV’s target audience included a large population of motorists who used a motorcycle as their form of daily transportation. Put them in a car, and you’ll immediately sell twice as many tires. Bibendum approves.
The real story might lie somewhere in between, blending arguments from both theories. Michelin might have simply identified a way to democratize the car in rural France while increasing its annual tire sales. In any case, we have the company to thank for the 2CV—and, indirectly, for a cool roadside attraction.
I was hoping we would get a 2CV theme park where the cars are the rides in various theme park style tracks.
I believe you can still hire a 2CV and driver to give you a tour of Paris…tres chic
The fireflies part is totally outrageous, but then again, this was the ’30s!
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