70s Parisienne Chod

[martc]

I remember speaking to a German car mechanic in the early '80's who hated working on British cars because of the imperial nuts and using different colour coding for the electrics (I can understand the fastener angst, but was he correct about the wiring colours?). He resented having to have a whole imperial tool kit at hand in case someone brought in a Brit car. 

However the same fella was also railing against French cars because the French always found an alternative method to achieve the same thing as other, more conservative, manufacturers. See also French mains electricity, their telephone system and their analogue tellies, all different to everyone else.

[Richard_FM]

3 hours ago, martc said:

I remember speaking to a German car mechanic in the early '80's who hated working on British cars because of the imperial nuts and using different colour coding for the electrics (I can understand the fastener angst, but was he correct about the wiring colours?). He resented having to have a whole imperial tool kit at hand in case someone brought in a Brit car. 

However the same fella was also railing against French cars because the French always found an alternative method to achieve the same thing as other, more conservative, manufacturers. See also French mains electricity, their telephone system and their analogue tellies, all different to everyone else.

In one book I have on car maintenance which lists car wiring colours from different countries, and notes that British Fords made before 1960 didn't use the standard British colours. 

[andrew e]

Can you guess what these two french motorist’s said?

if this was your guess your a winner 😉

[andrew e]

This is just perfect:

[danthecapriman]

16 hours ago, Richard_FM said:

It's always interesting to see British chod abroad, while I know Minis were popular in France & I guess ADO16s would also have some appeal, cars like Anglias & other Fords are a little harder to understand.   At least the Anglia had some individual looks hiding the conventional mechanical parts, but paying a 25% premium for something that didn't have much to offer over French produced cars in interesting, especially as non-dealer mechanics wouldn't have liked working on them with their non-metric fittings, not to mention parts supplies! 

Possibly the people with more conservative tastes I guess? Like them or loathe them, many French cars do have some pretty odd engineering to them, and unique styling shall we say. Not everyone likes or wants that.  
When I was in the garage I absolutely hated French stuff coming in. It was always awkward to work on and had some really odd ways of doing things nobody else did. A Ford by contrast was a breeze to do anything on.

Id imagine that 25% premium back then had much more influence over people’s car choices though. That’s a lot! 
I’ve heard before that at the time of these photos there were even rules about domestic produced vehicles on government and company vehicle fleets. Figures like 90% domestic production. No idea if it actually was the case or not? 
Other countries had similar things going on though, like in Spain where anything imported was subject to pretty hefty tax. To the point where lots of foreign vehicle manufacturers actually built factories in Spain or partnered with Spanish companies to build under licence and avoid the taxes. Loads of big companies did it too - AEC, Commer, Land Rover etc etc all did it. 
Im not sure it was a bad thing either tbh. We seemed happy to let everyone else do what they wanted and not bother protecting our own industries and interests!

Saying all that, I sometimes watch old films like Dirty Harry etc etc and you quite often see old European cars on the US roads mixing it with the big yank tanks. There’s an ADO16 on one of the Dirty Harry scenes where the nutter hijacks the school bus. I often wonder why on earth anyone in the US would want little peasant cars from Europe when there there was an enormous choice of US vehicles which were much better and better equipped. But I suppose not everyone wanted a gigantic car with a gigantic engine? Strange as that is!

[danthecapriman]

11 hours ago, andrew e said:

Can you guess what these two french motorist’s said?

if this was your guess your a winner 😉

What do you think that French plod was thinking looking at the camera!? He doesn’t look particularly impressed!

 

[chaseracer]

20 hours ago, martc said:

Can anyone identify the silver coupé in front of the blue R4?  I thought 'Honda 1300', but it is not...

[lesapandre]

22 minutes ago, chaseracer said:

Can anyone identify the silver coupé in front of the blue R4?  I thought 'Honda 1300', but it is not...

Simca 1000 Coupe or successor the 1200.