Down On The Street: Peugeot 504 Diesel
When I returned to my old DOTS stomping grounds to help defile a once-proud race track, I figured I might find an interesting street-parked car or two on the Island That Time Forgot. First there was this semi-custom ’62 Continental, but then I spotted the real prize.
Thanks for the picturesque background, San Francisco! The only French car I’ve ever owned was a 504 (gasoline-powered), and it was both cool and very maddening. So comfortable, yet so difficult to keep running. Believe it or not, you used to see a fair number of 504s on American roads… and, someday, I’ll get another one for myself.
This one is a much-battered diesel model, in full Ahmadinejad-grade white-sedan trim and apparently rigged to run on some flavor of biodiesel. Such stories this survivor could tell!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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My neighbor once had a white 504, just like the that one. He got a picture of it printed in the local paper. It seems a newspaper photographer saw my neighbor and two friends pushing the inoperable 504 to a mechanic down the street for yet another repair, and the photographer noticed the custom bumper sticker one of my neighbor's friends had put on it: Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Peugeots".
I had a gas 1976 504 in Germany when I was in the army in Germany in the late 70's It was a great car. It was supremely comfortable and very reliable. It was a great trip car which we drove all over Europe. It was actually fairly good in snow mainly due to the fact it had almost no power. I sold it when I left Germany because it did not have air conditioning and I was moving to the DC area.