Cournil
 |
|
| Private company | |
| Industry | Automotive |
| Headquarters |
Aurillac, France Saint-Germain-Laval, France |
|
Key people
|
|
| Products | Four-wheel drive agricultural quasi-Jeeps |
Bernard Cournil was a French vehicle maker who progressed from improving other people’s vehicles to manufacturing his own during the late 1950s. Rights to manufacture his design were subsequently held by a succession of businesses in Portugal after the French creator of the vehicle had disappeared from the picture. The vehicle built was also called the Cournil, and was intended mainly as an all-round offroad vehicle especially suited for farm usage: it could pull a plow and was offered with a PTO, cranes, or even machine gun mountings.
Bernard Cournil was born in Aurillac in April 1909. He was a passionate engineer and, as a young man, with the Tour de France, before returning to his native Cantal where he set up an automobile workshop business which as the next war progressed and the oil ran out, specialised in converting cars to run on wood based “gazogène” fuel.
After the war Cournil found a stock of US built Jeeps that had been left behind, and these he adapted and maintained for agricultural use. When Hotchkiss began to assemble Jeeps under license in France, it was a natural progression for Cournil to become a regional distributor for the Hotchkiss built Jeep, and in 1954 he went a stage further, concluding his own licensing agreement with Willys Jeep for assembling their vehicle.
Little by little Cournil now progressed from assembling Jeeps to improving them. Responding to a perceived concern over the robustness of the standard gear-box, Cournil substituted gearwheels derived from castings which he machined in his own workshops. He then started looking for an engine that would be more reliable than the ones provided from Hotchkiss, initially substituting a diesel unit from Ferguson. By the early 1960s he had decided that the Hotchkiss Jeep chassis was insufficiently robust for the agricultural challenges of central France, and had substituted his own virtually indestructible four-wheel drive vehicle which had progressed a long way beyond the original Jeep design and which in the Mining industry acquired the soubriquet “Tracteur Cournil”. The date when Cournil became a vehicle manufacturer in his own right was in 1960, when their own frame was introduced for the "Cournil Tracteur JA1". In 1961 Cournil changed the design of their truck, creating a distinct shape which was to last until 1986, and until 2004 in modified forms. The front was distinguished by drastically sloped fenders to allow for maximum visibility on the narrow mountain tracks for which the vehicle was intended.
...
Wikipedia