TIME considers this popular French voiture one of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time.
And here are the reasons:
The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette,tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.
Well, let me get nostalgic.
This is the car that on one long, cold night in January 1970, took me from Barcelona (Spain) to Paris (France) in an 18 hour Siberian drive.
Almost thirty nine years ago, I was the editor in Barcelona of an university newspaper (Gaceta Universitaria) that the Franco regime didn’t like at all; they were increasingly upset with our pictures and reports about the “students’ revolution” in Spain.
So, I was told that my name was on the police list of journalists to look after, and some friends recommended that I leave the country as soon as possible.
Said and done.
Somebody told me that a relative was leaving that night for Paris, driving her Dauphine, and I was invited to join the party.
We were three: the mother, driving, her daughter in the front and me in the back seat.
But the worst wasn’t the little car, the worst was that the girl had claustrophobia and she had her window open for all 18 hours.
Yes, it was like riding a horse on a rough winter journey, but I always will be grateful to this crazy car that helped me to escape jail and took me to the warm basement of the Maison de l’Italie at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, my home for the first days of my exile in France.
