In the late 1960s, a couple of Frenchmen living in the Ivory Coast took the robust mechanicals of Citroën’s long-running 2CV and built a utility body to fit. The result, the Baby-Brousse, spawned a legion of imitators, notable among them Greece’s NAMCO Pony and the Chilean Yagán. Not content to let the aftermarket have all the fun, Citroën developed a program that would allow for decentralized production of a simple sheetmetal body, while the French automaker would supply the underpinnings and powertrain. The people of villages in the developing world, with minimal investment, could start their own automobile factories! Based on the design brief—easy to build, easy to finance, or “Facile à Fabriquer and Facile à Financer” en français—the vehicle became known as the FAF. It made its debut in 1973.
(Two short years later, Van Doorne’s Automobielfabriek, the Dutch concern responsible for the CVT-pioneering DAF automobiles, quickly sold its carmaking interests to Volvo and turned its full attention to trucks. Coincidence? We think not.) Thoroughly aware of FAF’s supremacy in the realm of economical vehicles which end in capital A, capital F, we just about blew a gasket when we stumbled across this FAF A 4×4 for sale in France.
Citroën once built an utterly bizarre twin-engined, four-wheel-drive 2CV. This, however, was not based on that car, known as the Sahara. Instead, the FAF A 4×4 draws its guts from the more conventional Mehari 4×4 and utilizes the 652-cc engine from the diminutive Visa. Students of Citroën history will recall the plastic-bodied Méhari as the French answer to the Mini Moke, a car-based front-drive buggy perfect for an afternoon of seaside rambling. Most Méharis, however, were front-drivers, just as most FAFs carried over the 2CV’s layout pretty much verbatim.
The result of a defense contract with the Armée de Terre, the FAF A 4×4 of 1979 was designed as a lightweight, air-deployable machine, ideal for transporting troops dropped in remote locales with a minimum of immediate support. Its fuel-sipping flat-twin engine meant that a couple of jerrycans’ worth of fuel would take a few soldiers out into the North African desert and back—or, in case Brezhnev got any big ideas, off toward the Fulda Gap, where the Frankish jeeplets would likely find themselves nonchalantly run over by columns of advancing T-72s.
French army authorities apparently realized this hole in the plan somewhat early on, and according to the seller of this one, only 50 or so FAF A 4x4s wound up being constructed, 10 of which went to the military for evaluation. This survivor is claimed to be the only example with documents, although what documentation there is isn’t specified. Regardless, the FAF A 4×4 is a phenomenally rad spur of the 2CV’s endearingly dorky family tree. The ask is £19,000, which works out to about $23,450 at current exchange rates. Given that three years ago, a Biscúter 200-A sold for $28,750, and a Biscúter’s only got one driven wheel, this four-wheel-drive FAF can’t help standing out as an absolute bargain.
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