Vive la différence
A woman with a couple of pre-teen children came up to us while we were photographing the car to ask what it was.
She also asked how much it was, which prompted the realisation she thought this 20-year-old car was a new model. That is remarkable enough. Clearly, she was also intrigued enough to reach across the government-approved social distance barrier to find out more about it.
It’s an exchange that would surely have pleased the car’s designer, Patrick le Quément, whose primary goal in many of his designs was to present some fresh thinking and challenge the norms in the essentially conservative world of car design.
Being bold and innovative is as characteristic of French car design as croissants at a pavement cafe. While coming up with a different design and then navigating it successfully through a bureaucracy to get it built is an achievement in itself. The fact that, to an independent observer, it still looked brand new is a testament to the quality of the design. The design team clearly
