The Trio’s Most Bizarre Car Purchase Yet? Clarkson, Hammond & May Go Full French

If Britain’s most famous motoring trio has proved anything over the past two decades, it’s that no automotive absurdity is too strange, too impractical or too catastrophically engineered for them to explore. But even by their own standards of chaos, their latest indulgence—purchasing the oddest French cars ever built—felt like a journey into a parallel universe where logic, ergonomics and physics went on permanent strike.

French cars have always enjoyed a reputation for eccentricity. Citroën, Matra, and Renault have each produced masterpieces of innovation and works of outright lunacy. So naturally, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May decided to embrace that madness head-on by buying three of the most unusual French vehicles ever conceived. What followed was a tour through the bizarre, the brilliant and the utterly bonkers world of Gallic automotive design.

Clarkson’s Citroën CX Safari: A Car That Seems Allergic to Normality

Jeremy Clarkson’s choice was perhaps the most French of all French cars: the Citroën CX Safari. Long, elegant and astonishingly strange, it looks like a spaceship, rides like a sofa, and behaves like a stubborn house cat.

Finding one, Clarkson explained, “wasn’t easy,” largely because many surviving examples have been turned into motorhomes. But the effort was worth it, he claimed—though the CX immediately began demonstrating why most manufacturers don’t start design meetings by asking, “What rules can we break today?”

The indicators are the first clue. Instead of the normal stalk on the steering column, Citroën fitted a rocker switch placed nowhere near the driver’s hands. This means the indicators don’t self-cancel, forcing the driver to manually switch them off like operating a desk lamp while hurtling around a bend.

Then there’s the stereo—mounted vertically between the seats, in prime position to catch falling pastry. “If you’re enjoying a cheeky pain au chocolat,” Clarkson warned, “any crumbs will drop straight into the cassette player and ruin your Vanessa Paradis tape.” The brake pedal, meanwhile, isn’t really a pedal at all. It’s a button. Push it and the brakes are either fully on or fully off. No middle ground.

“It’s just about impossible to use properly,” Clarkson muttered, before suggesting that arriving at your destination and performing “a George Michael” might be safer than attempting to park the thing.

Hammond’s Matra Murena: A Sports Car With Three Seats and No Logic

Richard Hammond’s selection was no less bewildering: the Matra Murena, a mid-engine sports car that tries very hard to be exciting but ends up being… well, French.

The Murena looks like an ’80s wedge-shaped speed machine, but inside it features an unexpected twist—three seats, all in the front row. Hammond joked that the arrangement might come in handy “if my wife and my mistress want a drive at the same time.”

But if the interior is odd, the engine borders on tragic. A sports car should roar; this one whimpers. With a tiny 1.6-litre engine producing just 88 horsepower, “it doesn’t make any sense,” Hammond sighed. “Matra built the Exocet missile. That is a fast thing. This is really not.”

Even its name defies logic. While other manufacturers choose titles like Mustang, Jaguar or Scirocco, Matra chose “Murena,” which Hammond claimed translated roughly to “son of a plebeian family who likes eels.”

“We have searched through all languages,” he mocked, adopting a French accent. “This is the weirdest name possible. We will have it.”

May’s Renault Avantime: A Plastic Luxury Coupe That Defies All Rules

James May, always the connoisseur of oddball engineering, went even further off-piste by purchasing a Renault Avantime—a futuristic plastic luxury coupe designed when Renault’s engineers seemingly abandoned reality altogether.

Tasked in 1998 with creating a grand tourer to rival the BMW 6 Series, Renault delivered something that looked like a high-speed train drawn by an enthusiastic eight-year-old. It is vast, angular, and filled with more dashboard acreage than practical sense.

The instruments aren’t where you expect them. The doors—famously the heaviest production car doors in history—don’t even open properly. May demonstrated the problem: “That is as far as it goes,” he groaned as the door barely cracked open. “On any sort of slope, it can actually be difficult to get out. Bloody Nora.”

Three Cars. No Logic. Pure Comedy.

What began as a simple challenge turned into a celebration of French eccentricity at its finest. Clarkson wrestled with brakes that behaved like light switches. Hammond pondered his three-seat “sports” car with the power of a lawnmower. May battled doors heavier than pop icon Kylie Minogue.

Together, they proved once again that while the French may occasionally ignore convention, they never fail to entertain—and neither do the trio brave (or foolish) enough to drive their creations.