Driving the Rarest French Cars In America

After puttering around the parking lot in a series of thin-skinned French micro-cars that made us feel like a French peasant delivering artichokes to market in 1961, we nabbed an electric scooter and drove it up and down the aisles of the Lane Motor Museum.

The museum was closed for the day, so there were no bumbling tourists or scolding docents to avoid. Instead, there was simply row after row of the most unconventional vehicles we’d ever seen, every one of them obscure and adorable. If Wes Anderson collected cars, we thought, this would be his hoard.

This was already a perfect experience, but it was simply the amuse bouche to what was possibly the greatest automotive day of our lives. (And we’ve banked some pretty amazing days, vehicularly speaking.) The Lane, at the behest of its generous proprietor Jeff Lane and his team of crack mechanics, had invited us to Tennessee to preview its latest exhibit, which celebrated the glorious insanity that is the history of French cars.

In college, our school’s art museum hosted a program that allowed students to borrow, and hang in their dorm rooms, original works of art by, say, Andy Warhol or Robert Rauchenberg, the idea being that personal exposure to art enriches one’s life. Jeff Lane feels similarly about cars. “They’re pieces of sculpture,” he tells us. “They’re meant to be enjoyed. In motion.”

To this end, Jeff gave us the opportunity to drive along one of the most ideal roadways in America—the Natchez Trace—in a half dozen of the world’s most iconic French cars: dreams and revelations to a one.

We began the day in a golden 1973 Citroën SM, the ovoid, swivel-headlamped, sharp-nosed, Maserati-powered executive grand touring missile that pretty much defines its louche decade. The car is driven with your heart, and your fingertips. Everything about it is smooth and dulcet, and weird, as if your internal soundtrack is being played on a synthesized bassoon. It is effortless and emotional all at once. We might need one.

Next came its polar opposite, a 1985 Renault R-5 Turbo, a homologated archetype of the era’s unhinged factory racers. To produce it, Renault ripped out the back seat of their front engine, front-wheel-drive econo-hatch, installed a booming turbocharged motor driving the rear wheels, and fed it through gaping intakes in flared rear fenders. The delay in the forced induction system’s spool up is so severe that it’s impossible to keep this car in its power band. But the revs between 4,500 and 6,000 rpm were glorious.

A 1965 Matra D’jet followed. This minuscule, fiberglass-bodied, targa-topped, two-seater featured the first production use of a mid-engine layout in a road car. It was at once hearty and delicate, with perfect steering, lithe power, and looks that clearly inspired the Saab Sonett and Opel GT. It also featured a strange ajar-open lock on its narrow tailgate. During testing, the engineers apparently realized that at 80 m.p.h. the draft from the removable roof panel would blow out the rear windshield. Voila! Venting solution.

Taunting us with its impossible shape—the hooded eyes from a Lamborghini 350 GT, the boomerang-imprinted flank of a Mercedes S-Class Coupe, the acute C-pillar from a VW Dasher—was an experimental 1970 Citroën M-35. The engine on this prototype was a single rotor design borrowed from NSU, providing an eerie and seamlessly torquey output that made the car feel oddly electric. We felt oddly delighted, and confused.

We skipped the 1954 Citroën 2CV that was on offer because we don’t fetishize cheap crap, and chose instead a 1937 Citroën 7C to provide historical context. With its flat black paint and center-hinged doors, it also provided a sort of O.G. street cred. We felt like a character from a French noir. Hosting front-wheel drive, and a dash-mounted three speed that required a very firm hand, it felt remarkably modern for a nearly 80-year-old car.

Finally, we drove the goddess, a 1959 Citroën ID 19, the more plebian version of the audacious DS. During an era when Cadillac was producing Space Age behemoths, the French were designing the real future. Like a contemporary Mercedes 300 SL gullwing, it has no discernible ancestors. It was, and is, an enigma. And it was, and is, perfect—so long as someone else maintains it, sources and interprets its inscrutable switchgear, and flushes annually its gallons of brake-fluid filled hydraulics. Unpredictably, it was our favorite.

We left Nashville enamored. These cars featured shapes and composition that denied precedent, dubious interior materials that drew inspiration from both fine jewelry and mass-produced appliances, and demented engineering solutions that had no root in any discernable problem. They reminded us that the French invented modern-with-a-capital M in art, design, and architecture, breaking with tradition and forging their own visionary solutions. And they reminded us that we love cars as much for how they sound, smell, and drive, as for what they preserve about their origin, and our world.