Yesterday I visited the 2018 edition of La Fête des Limousines, a show focusing on the top models of French automakers. There was this Peugeot that didn’t quite fit in the line-ups of its compatriots. It just had to stand out from the crowd.
From 1975 to 1985, the 604 was Peugeot’s top model. It was powered by a V6 gasoline engine or -from 1979 onwards- a 4-cylinder turbodiesel. With an overall length of 472 cm (186”) it was a typical European executive sedan, nowadays often referred to as an E-segment or German car.
It was renowned coachbuilder Heuliez that built a Peugeot executive sedan for the final boss. Not too many final bosses insisted on having a Peugeot though, as only 124 of these extra long 604 editions were made from 1978 to 1984. According to the side window info sheet, just 28 of them do still exist. A rare bird -or lion- it is.
The factory 280 cm (110.2″) wheelbase was extended by 62 cm (24.4″). This limousine is powered by a fuel injected 2.7 liter V6, good for 144 DIN-hp. The transmission is a ZF 3-speed automatic.
The info sheet further mentioned that the car was ordered by the Peugeot company, to be used as a demo for their Special Sales division. It can also be seen in the 1983 movie Le Battant, featuring Alain Delon (the French Steve McQueen).
This was just the first voiture extraordinaire on stage, more in the foreseeable future. And what a collection of extraordinary automobiles it was!
Great to see such a rarity but man the 604’s styling leaves me cold. The 505 at least had some shape and character to its lines. If I wanted something blocky and austere, I’d get a Talbot Tagora – that’s peak box!
I didn’t know about them. Kind of an Audi drawn with a straightedge.
With a French or British interior.
The Tagora looks like it was meant to be the aspirational move up for the satisfied Renault Alliance owner.
From that angle it reminds me of those fugly fox body Fords. In real life it wasn’t that bad, just dull.
I actually really like the lines of the 604 it doesn’t leave me cold at all. Everything about it says elegance.
For the top boss who has to have a French vehicle for political/business reasons.
A pretty small niche.
And one that had by that time long favored Citroen. That basically left Peugeot’s division-level boss and French embassies in countries too important for the ambassador to get by with a stock 604 and lacking the service infrastructure to support a hydropneumatic CX.
I thought Jean-Paul Belmondo was the French Steve McQueen as shown in the car chase from the French movie “Le Marginal” unless he’s the French Clint Eastwood. 😉
His son Paul was of course an F1 driver whose career gave rise to the joke “What’s the opposite of pole position? Paul Belmondo!”.
hehehe
Great find. I’ve been aware of these, but needless to say, never saw one in the US. It would not have done any better here than at home, to put it mildly.
The boxy yet elegant 604 makes a great basis for a stretch, but needless to say, I’m not happy about the vinyl roof and the C Pillar treatment. It undoubtedly cover up the custom body work; easier and cheaper than filling and finishing the seams properly.
Also broughamy. Posh for the time.
The standard 604 looked OK – or at least inoffensive.
However this limo looks as if the same design principles were followed as used by Russians for various luxury cars illustrated in a very recent story here.
I had no idea these even existed. I imagine that V6 would be working hard when fully laden.
I’m not a fan of stretched limos, though that one isnt too ridiculous, the extra long one are stupid and just create a crawl space on wheels nothing luxurious about them,
An even more ungainly French limo was recently posted to the Cohort:
https://flic.kr/p/27JkDVs
I think I now have a favorite limousine. Even back in the 1980s, I was oddly attracted to 604s, but never imagined a stretch version. Great find and write-up.
Great find Johannes. Judging by the white one at rear, it looks like these might have come in non-broughamatic roof covering.
hmmmm… mebbe not
Oh dear, that looks like a wedding tent on a Christmas river barge. Just no.
Pininfarina designed the elegant, aloof-looking 604, and though it may lack the elegance of their stylistically-related Fiat 130 coupe, this eye-waterer stretch job shows vividly that if you change some proportions of a good design, the rest collapses too. In fact, just ask Pininfarina itself how well the Fiat 130 translated into the Rolls- Royce Camargue.
And at least 28 owners think it’s worth preserving, proving again that human variability is infinite.
It looks a lot like the contemporary Cadillac Series 75, which is odd because Cadillac only justified the limo by using essentially the entire rear half of a Coupe deVille body. The 604 was not only a unibody but didn’t have a two-door variant to use the back half of in that way – it looks like this because someone wanted it to, not from expediency.
Were these used by Funeral Homes, as family cars, similar to the ones we use in the States, or really used by executives as their daily transport? In the States, family car limos were usually Cadillacs or Lincolns, but occasionally one would have a Pontiac or Buick or Olds version, often to match the marque of the hearse used by the funeral home. Not a “super stretch” for carrying prom going teens nor a 6 door version for airport shuttles, but still longer than standard. The US limos were not normally used as chauffeured vehicles for a single owner, rather, they were used by either livery services or aforementioned mortuaries as transport of the grieving family following a hearse.
As far as I know, funeral operations in Europe don’t have limos at all. It’s an American thing.
The Talbot Tagora (in the above comments) looks a lot like the Hyundai Stellar, and this stretched 604 (always liked this car; the Barbados High Commission in England had one as its official car when we first landed in the UK in 1977) reminds me of a stretched W126 Mercedes I saw in a music video on Youtube last week (Eugene Wilde’s “Don’t Say No Tonight” from 1986).
These are an excellent reminder of why the Citroen CX was just an infinitely better car. Ten CXs were sold for each 604. Did they learn from this fiasco? Non, monsieur. They did the 605 and the 607. All bombs to various degrees. Even the 601 was a failure, back in the ’30s.
Peugeot just aren’t too good at the high-end stuff…
On a small point, I would hesitate to call Heuliez a “renowned coachbuilder” just as I would not call McDonald’s sandwiches “gourmet food”. Heuliez got into car body-making in the mid ’60s, long after the custom coachbuilt era was passed. They were no PininaFarina, bur more in the Karmann league: semi-industrial, working closely with a few big carmakers.
A couple of stretched 604 landaus were made by Chapron around 1978. And in this case, there was renown. But also vast expense – old school production methods were very labour-intensive. It would be interesting to compare the Heuliez “production” 604 limo with the “bespoke” Chapron.
Great find, Johannes.. Now find us the Chapron version!
Ten CXs were sold for each 604.
I’m sorry, but that’s a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. The Peugeot 504 and 505 competed directly with all of the versions of the CX except the Prestige, no? Meaning the bulk of the CX range. Or what Citroen did compete against the 504/505?
There were a total of 1.2 million CXs ever built. Peugeot built over 3 million 504 for Europe alone (of course some of those were before 1974 when the CX started) and they built over 1.3 million 505s. It appears these Peugeots handily outsold the CX.
Admittedly, the 604 was not exactly a big success with 153 k sold. But then it was always only a top-end car, with only the V6 gas engine (and later the turbo diesel) And just how many CX Prestiges were sold?
And I doubt Peugeot lost money on the 604 despite the low numbers, as it was really just a 504 under the skin with a boxier body and a slight wheelbase stretch.
Comparing profitability of these two companies is obviously not going to favor Citroen, as Peugeot had to buy/rescue them in the end. Did Citroen actually ever make much money on the CX program? 1.2 million CXs over its 16 year life = 75k per year. That sounds like a pretty low number with which to generate any decent profits, for a car that didn’t have any significant sharing with another model to spread costs.
Not surprisingly, the 604 had a hard time competing against the somewhat similar conventional RWD premium cars from Germany. But the Germans soon enough ate Citroen’s big car business too, eh? The XM was a rather dismal failure, selling only some 330k in over 11 years. That’s a total dud.
I appreciate that you love the CX, and I love it too, but from a business point of view, Peugeot with their 504/505 was clearly on a more successful track in the large car market than Citroen with its CX, even if the 604 didn’t amount to very much. A bit of icing on their large-car cake.
One last point: although it was very different than the CX, the 604 received a lot of critical acclaim when it arrived. But trying to butt heads with Mercedes and BMW was obviously a lost cause, not matter how good the car.