This edition of French Deadly Sins will attempt to untangle one of the most complex automotive clusterfucks ever devised by modern man.
Tomorrow, we will re- visit the ancient Talbot marque, which was famously resurrected to replace Simca, only to fade away again. Born in as Enrico Teodoro, Pigozzi arrived in Paris in He was more of an expat, sent by Fiat to find sources of scrap metal for the Turin factories. Pigozzi was a Fiat man through and through. And he noticed there were a number of Fiats on French roads. They were imported, but tariffs on imports made them less competitive than if they were assembled locally.
The year-old Pigozzi persuaded Fiat that he was the man to do it. He rented a small factory and CKD kits were sent over from Turin — subject to a much lower tariff, naturally. Main automobile factories not including coachbuilders and truck-makers in and nearby Paris, The operation was an immediate success: almost 30, cars were sold in the first 20 months.
This area was quite the French Motown at the time: only Berliet , Bugatti , Mathis and Peugeot were based out in the provinces. The CKD operation had its limits, though. Custom duties on spare parts were increased in , and Fiat were keenly aware that this hamstrung their efforts in France. The cars proposed by Simca-Fiat, as the business was known initially, were virtually identical to the 1-litre Fiat Balilla and 2-litre Ardita.
The issue of production capacity soon became evident. The Simcas were too expensive because they were not produced on a modern assembly line. But this was the heart of the Depression and Automakers were going bust left and right. Pigozzi was, at age 36, at the helm of one of the biggest operations in the Parisian auto-belt.
