The World's Oldest Car Company Started by Making Saws, Corsets, and Pepper Grinders

Before Peugeot built its first car, it built saws. And corsets. And coffee grinders. And pepper grinders. And bicycles.

This is not a metaphor. The Peugeot family of Valentigney, in the Franche-Comté region of France, began manufacturing in 1810 with a steel foundry. Over the following decades, they diversified through saws, hand tools, coffee grinders, waist corsets made with light steel blades, pepper grinders, umbrella frames, and eventually bicycles. The company's iconic lion logo, still used today, originally symbolised the speed, strength, and flexibility of Peugeot's saw blades.

The connection between a corset manufacturer and the world's oldest surviving car company is not as absurd as it sounds. It was the steel rods used in structured petticoats and crinoline dresses that led to the wire wheels that led to the bicycles that led, eventually, to Armand Peugeot's fascination with self-propelled vehicles. In manufacturing, one thing leads to another. At Peugeot, one thing led to everything.

The First Cars and the First Race

Armand Peugeot, born in 1849, became interested in automobiles early, at a time when nobody was quite sure what an automobile was supposed to be. His first vehicle, produced in 1889, was a three-wheeled steam-powered car designed in collaboration with Léon Serpollet. Only four examples were made. Steam power was heavy, required lengthy warm-up times, and was fundamentally inconvenient.

By 1890, Armand had abandoned steam entirely. After meetings with Gottlieb Daimler and Émile Levassor, he moved to a four-wheeled car with a petrol-fuelled internal combustion engine built by Panhard under Daimler's licence. It had a three-point suspension and a sliding-gear transmission more sophisticated than most of its contemporaries. One example was sold to a young Alberto Santos-Dumont, who exported it to Brazil.

The cars multiplied quickly. Twenty-nine were built in 1892. Forty in 1894. Seventy-two in 1895. Three hundred in 1899, when total car sales across all of France amounted to 1,200 units. Peugeot was already a dominant force in an industry that barely existed.

The company was also an early pioneer in motor racing, which, in the 1890s, meant something considerably more dangerous and considerably more improvisational than the word "racing" now implies. In 1894, a Peugeot driven by Albert Lemaître won the Paris-Rouen, generally recognised as the world's first motor race. Five Peugeots qualified for the main event. All five finished. The company's competitive instincts were there from the very beginning, and they never left.

The Engineering Breakthrough That Shaped Motorsport for a Century

In 1912, Peugeot made its most significant contribution to automotive engineering, and it came through racing.

A team of three driver-engineers, working with 26-year-old Swiss engineer Ernest Henry, produced a racing car powered by a straight-four engine with dual overhead camshafts and four valves per cylinder. This configuration, now standard on virtually every performance engine in the world, was, at the time, a radical departure from the massive-displacement engines that produced power through sheer size rather than efficiency and precision.

The car was immediately faster than anything it raced against. Georges Boillot won the 1912 French Grand Prix at an average of 68.45 mph despite losing third gear and taking a 20-minute pit stop. The following year, Jules Goux took a similar car to Indianapolis and won the 500 at an average of 75.92 mph, recording straightaway speeds of 93.5 mph. Peugeot became the first non-American manufacturer to win at Indianapolis, a record that attracted enormous attention.

The influence of the Peugeot engine spread further than any of the participants could have anticipated. When one of the Peugeot racers remained in the United States during World War I, its owner had it serviced in the shop of Harry Miller by a young mechanic named Fred Offenhauser. Their close familiarity with the Peugeot engine became the direct basis for the Miller racing engine, which later evolved into the Offenhauser, one of the most successful racing engines in American history.

Peugeot did not just win races in 1912. It invented the architecture of the modern high-performance engine.

The War Years: Sabotage in the Factory

The Second World War placed Peugeot, like every French manufacturer, in an impossible position. The company's Sochaux plant produced vehicles for the Nazi German war effort, armoured vehicles, and components that the occupying forces required.

What made Peugeot's situation distinctive was what happened beneath the surface. The company's management was largely sympathetic with the French Resistance, and workers engaged in systematic industrial sabotage. Rudolphe and Jean-Pierre Peugeot personally granted a loan of one hundred thousand francs to Special Operations Executive agent Harry Rée. After a RAF bombing raid in July 1943 that killed 110 people, the Peugeot management at Sochaux struck a deal with Rée: they would continue sabotage operations specifically to prevent the plant from becoming a target for further Allied bombing. A team of 22 saboteurs carried out this work throughout the occupation, and the Waffen-SS tasked with plant security never identified a single one of them.

It is a story that sits uneasily alongside the fact of collaboration, but it is also a story of genuine courage operating within impossible constraints.

The 205: The Car That Saved the Company

By the early 1980s, Peugeot was in serious trouble. The company had expanded aggressively through the 1970s, taking over Citroën in 1975, then absorbing the European operations of Chrysler in 1978, rebranding those cars under the revived Talbot name, and was now struggling under the weight of its own ambitions.

The rescue came in the form of a small car.

The Peugeot 205, launched in 1983, was a supermini that was sharply styled, rewarding to drive, and immediately popular. It regularly became the bestselling car in France. In Britain, annual sales topped 50,000 by the late 1980s. It won consistent praise for its styling, its ride, and its handling qualities that French cars of the period were not universally credited with.

The 205 stayed on sale in many markets until 1998, overlapping with the introduction of its successor and cementing its reputation as one of the finest small cars of its era. Its successor, the 206, eventually became the best-selling Peugeot model of all time, with 8,358,217 units sold by 2012.

The 205 also dominated rallying. In the mid-1980s, Peugeot entered Group B — the most dangerous, most spectacular, and most short-lived category in World Rally Championship history with the 205 T16, a turbocharged, four-wheel-drive evolution of the production car that bore only superficial resemblance to what you could buy in a showroom. Despite a near-fatal accident involving star driver Ari Vatanen in Argentina, his teammate Timo Salonen led Peugeot to the drivers' and manufacturers' world championship titles in 1985. The following year, 1986, Peugeot won again with Juha Kankkunen. When Group B was banned after Henri Toivonen's fatal accident in 1987, Peugeot pivoted immediately to rally raids, winning the Dakar Rally four consecutive times from 1987 to 1990.

Decades later, Peugeot returned to Dakar and won seven consecutive victories from 2012 to 2018 again, with drivers including Sébastien Loeb and the peerless Stéphane Peterhansel.

The American Question

Peugeot began selling cars in the United States in 1958. For more than three decades, it maintained a presence in the American market, never dominant, always niche, occasionally promising.

The 505 was its last serious attempt: a large saloon that had found genuine success in African and Asian markets but aged ungracefully in the face of Japanese and domestic competition in the United States. Total US sales fell to 4,261 units in 1990, then to 2,240 through just the first seven months of 1991. The decision to withdraw was not a surprise.

Peugeot has not returned to the American market since. It sells cars in virtually every other major market on earth, but not, as of today, in the United States or Canada. For a brand of this scale and this history, that absence is one of the stranger footnotes in global automotive geography.

From PSA to Stellantis

In 1976, Peugeot merged with Citroën to form the PSA Group, one of Europe's largest automotive conglomerates, eventually incorporating the remnants of Chrysler Europe, Talbot, and Vauxhall's commercial vehicle lines. The two brands maintained separate identities while sharing platforms, engineering, and manufacturing infrastructure.

In January 2021, PSA merged with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to create Stellantis, now one of the largest automotive groups in the world, encompassing Peugeot, Citroën, Opel, Vauxhall, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Jeep, Dodge, Ram, and several other brands. Peugeot continues to operate as a distinct brand within that structure, with its own design language, its own model range, and its own identity.

The electrification targets are ambitious. By 2025, the company aimed for all Peugeot models to offer an electrified variant. By 2030, the expectation is that every Peugeot sold in Europe will be electrified in some form.

215 Years

Peugeot was founded in 1810. It has survived a steel foundry, a corset business, a bicycle company, two world wars, a near-bankruptcy, the collapse of Group B rallying, a failed American adventure, several corporate mergers, and the transition from petrol to electric. It has won the world's first motor race, the Indianapolis 500, the French Grand Prix, the World Rally Championship, and the Dakar Rally more times than almost anyone can remember.

Not bad for a company that started by making saws.

The lion logo has been walking for 215 years. It shows no particular sign of stopping.