The story
Founded by Fiat in 1934, in Paris.1
Foundation
Henri Pigozzi was active in the automotive business in the early 1920s when he met Fiat founder Giovanni Agnelli. They began business together in 1922 with Pigozzi acting as a scrap merchant, buying old automobile bodies and sending them to Fiat for recycling. Two years later Pigozzi became Fiat's General Agent in France and in 1926 SAFAF (Société Anonyme Française des Automobiles Fiat) was founded. In 1928, SAFAF started the assembly of Fiat cars in Suresnes near Paris and licensed the production of some parts to local suppliers. By 1934, as many as 30,000 Fiat cars were sold by SAFAF.
1946: a decisive year
On 3 January 1946, the new government's five-year plan for the automobile industry (remembered, without affection, as the Pons Plan) came into force. Government plans for Simca involved pushing it into a merger with various smaller companies such as Delahaye-Delage, Bernard, Laffly and Unic so as to create an automobile manufacturing combine to be called “Générale française automobile” (GFA). With half an eye on the Volkswagen project across the Rhine, the authorities determined that GFA should produce the two door version of the "AFG", a small family car that had been developed during the war by the influential automobile engineer, Jean-Albert Grégoire. Grégoire owed his influence to a powerfully persuasive personality and a considerable engineering talent. Regarding the future of the French automobile industry, Grégoire held strong opinions, two of which were a preference for front-wheel drive and for aluminium as a material for car bodies. A few weeks after the liberation, Grégoire joined the Simca board as General Technical Director in order to prepare for the production of the AFG at the company's Nanterre factory.
For Simca, faced with a determinedly dirigiste left-wing French government, the prospect of nationalisation seemed very real. (Renault had already been confiscated and nationalised by the government at the start of 1945.) Simca's long-standing (but Italian-born) Director General, Henri Pigozzi, was obliged to deploy his very considerable reserves of guile and charm in order to retain his own position within the company, and it appears that in the end Pigozzi owed his very survival at Simca to the intervention with the national politicians of his new boardroom colleague, Jean-Albert Grégoire. In return, Grégoire obtained the personal commitment of the surviving Director General to the production at Nanterre of his two-door AFG.
It is very easy to see how the two-door AFG looked, because its four-door equivalent went into production, little changed from Grégoire's prototype, as the Panhard Dyna X. It was a car designed by an engineer, and Pigozzi thought it ugly. Simca designers hoped to make it more appealing to the style-conscious car buyers who, it was believed, would appear in Simca showrooms once the economy picked up and government restrictions on car ownership began to be relaxed. The designers took the underpinnings of the Grégoire prototype and clothed it with various more conventionally modern bodies, the last of which looked uncannily similar to a shortened Peugeot 203. This 'Simca-Grégoire' performed satisfactorily in road tests in France and around Turin (home town of Fiat, which still owned Simca), and by September 1946 the car was deemed ready for production. But Pigozzi was still cautious. He had little enthusiasm for the gratuitously unfathomable complexities involved in producing a mass-market front-wheel drive car. The experience of the Citroën Traction Avant, which had bankrupted its manufacturer in the mid-1930s, was not encouraging. Pigozzi therefore applied to the (at this stage still strongly interventionist) government for a far higher level of government subsidy than the government could contemplate. Both the “Simca-Grégoire” project and the government's own enthusiasm for micro-managing the French automobile industry were by now running out of momentum. Sensing that there was no prospect of putting the 'Simca-Grégoire' into production any time soon, General Technical Director Grégoire resigned from the company early in 1947.
Meanwhile, in October 1946, at the first Paris Motor Show since the end of the Second World War, two models were on display on the Simca stand, being the Simca 5 and the Simca 8, at this stage barely distinguishable from their pre-war equivalents. A new car arrived in 1948 with the Simca 6, a development of the Simca 5 which it would eventually replace, featuring an overhead valve 570 cc engine: the Simca 6 was launched ahead of the introduction of the equivalent Fiat.
The French economy in this period was in a precarious condition and government pressure was applied on the automakers to maximize export sales. During the first eight months of 1947, Simca exported 70% of cars produced, placing it behind Citroën (92% exported), Renault (90% exported), Peugeot (87% exported) and Ford France (83% exported). In the struggle to maximize exports, Simca was handicapped by the fact that it was not allowed to compete directly with its principal Italian shareholder, Fiat.
From Wikipedia’s article on Simca, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3