Family Fortunes Part 17

Yet Jean Panhard had actively wanted a roots-and-branches collaboration with the Quai de Javel: “What I reproach Citroen for is that they didn’t take us sufficiently under their wing. They were totally uninterested in the running of their subsidiary. They left us to our own devices. But when they saw that we’d ended up in a mess they weren’t happy. They had to take us over. I’m not Machiavellian. I hadn’t been aiming for that. But it was evident that they had no choice. They couldn’t let their subsidiary collapse.Happily this wasn’t the end for Panhard. The military vehicle operation had been consistendy successful, and was hived off into a separate division, the Societe de Constructions Mecaniques Panhard et Levassor. Run by Jean Panhard until his retirement in 1978, with Louis Delagarde as chief engineer until 1975, the SCMPL is still a thriving part of the Peugeot-Citroen group.