I Went To Europe For The First Time And The Cars, Roads, And Driving Broke My Brain

This month marked a major milestone in my life. For the first time ever, I left the borders of the United States for another country. Freshly minted passport in hand, I traveled to Germany and then France. I expected Europe to be different than America in many ways, such as how driving works, but also similar, with mostly familiar cars on the road. France, however, completely thwarted my expectations and blew my mind for the couple of days I was out there. Vive la différence, but man, la différence was really twisting my melon. 

Sadly (for me, and hopefully for you!), we’ve reached the end of my article series about my first-ever trip outside of America thanks to Audi’s invitation to the 2025 S5 launch. I’ve long wanted to experience car culture around the world, and while this trip wasn’t very long, it gave me my first taste of what I hope will be many more globetrotting adventures to come. But first: France and Germany! 

I’ve said it before, but this trip was very different for our site. Normally, we’d send a freelancer on a trip like this, because losing a full-time staffer for nearly a week is not ideal [Ed Note: especially when we’re losing a talented, prolific, Premium Quality staffer – Pete]. And we generally don’t write much about the travel aspects of press trips. We usually just pop in the “Full Disclaimer …” boilerplate about the automaker footing the bill and get back to writing about the car. 

We’re not a travel blog after all, and it’s easy for world-weary authors to forego “I can’t believe I’m in [cool place]” gushing when it’s old hat to them. But it’s an entirely new hat for me! Pretty much everyone on staff had left their respective countries for exciting ports abroad, and I didn’t even have a passport. The whole team saw me getting my passport as something to celebrate, and this trip with Audi was a great way to get a first taste of international travel. The fact that I was there to review a car was even better!

If you’re reading about my journey for the first time, here’s a refresher: I started by talking about how airport lounges make the airport experience downright lavish. Then I covered what flying in the highest class on an international flight is like. Later, I talked about the car I drove out there. Now, let’s talk about, you know, actually driving in Europe.

My journey started when my United Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner landed in Frankfurt. Immediately upon exit, Germany proved to be a very different place. I walked up a jet bridge only to end up in a room with a staircase. Passengers from the plane dragged their luggage up this staircase and the whole time I felt like that whole thing was unnecessary.

I was so happy that my first-ever passport stamp was going to come from Germany. My family lineage on my dad’s side traces back to Germany, so it felt cool that maybe, in the smallest of ways, a part of me returned home or something. I was super excited about this and I couldn’t hold it in when I handed my passport to the Bundespolizei or the German federal police. Well, the officer definitely didn’t match my energy. She asked me how long I was going to be in Europe, stamped my passport, and sent me on my way without ever changing her facial expression.

Once I landed in Nice, France, I expected an experience both similar and different from what I’m used to in America. I expected the roads to be narrow. I expected the signage to be different. And I expected to see tight spaces and lots of roundabouts.

And for some reason, I expected traffic to be light, and for most of the cars to be Euro versions of what have in America. Seriously, I expected to see stuff like Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics, just with amber turn signals and such. I even planned on doing a European car-spotting thing, thinking I’d only occasionally catch a weird car I’d never seen before.

I was surprised the moment I left the terminal – it was very much the other way around. I’d say about 95 percent of the cars I saw on the roads of Nice were machines we just don’t get in America in any capacity. My car-spotting plans were for naught because basically every single car I saw was something I had only seen online or in video games. I couldn’t keep up with photographing the overload of OMG, and I soon had to give up because I was giving myself a migraine.

The photos below were taken from the passenger seat of the Audi S5, from my phone placed on the dashboard, or while stopped in traffic:

Right out of the gate, I noticed that this part of France was addicted to the Renault Twingo. There was basically a constant parade of all three generations of Twingo on practically every street. However, based on what my eyes saw, it seemed the most popular Twingos in Nice were the first and third generations. I did not see a ton of classic cars out there, but I saw countless first-generation Twingos. Sometimes, those cars were packed four French guys deep and all of them were puffing on what I assumed to be a Winston cigarette.

The variety of cars I saw out there was something else. One moment I was marveling at an old Fiat Panda, the next I was left slack-jawed by a street-parked vintage RV. I saw countless Nissan Jukes, tiny hatchbacks that made me feel like a biologist observing undiscovered species, and plenty of cars from Citroën’s DS division.

Perhaps most surprising of all was just how popular quadricycles were. I’ve always known that the quadricycle was an option for European buyers but thought maybe they would be a rare sight. I was very wrong. I lost count of how many Citroën Amis I saw and there were even more Chinese things that looked like they were descendants of Jason’s Changli.

I then discovered what counts as a French shitbox, and it’s my beloved Smart Fortwo! I frequently scanned the sides of the road and was surprised to see lots of Smart Fortwos in a sorry state. I’m talking about mismatched wheels, flat tires, missing panels, and being covered in so much dust that you know they haven’t run in years. A part of me wants to go back to France just to rescue these cars, like a highly specific version of Vice Grip Garage.

Weirdly, there wasn’t a ton of Smart variety out there. I expected to see some original Forfours or maybe a Roadster or two. Instead, I saw a lot of second-generation Fortwos, a handful of third-generation Fortwos, a lot of second-generation Forfours, and a couple of first-generation Fortwos. I understand that Smart never sold many of the original Forfour and the Roadster was a reliability disaster, but I hoped that I’d see maybe one of these cars still kicking it out there.

Another surprise was just how few larger vehicles drove down those French roads. I wasn’t expecting F-150s or anything like that, but maybe some Euro-spec Ford Rangers and some of Volkswagen’s European crossovers. Now, I did see some really cool trucks in Germany and Germany was also crawling with all kinds of Opels, but France didn’t have any of that.

If I did see a truck, it was usually a cabover truck just a little bigger than a Kei truck with the same kind of tray with folding walls. Semi-tractors and other commercial trucks were also of the cabover form factor, which I expected. But I also loved to see that European truck drivers love pimping out their rigs, sometimes even more than American truckers do. The most surprising truck I saw, which I couldn’t whip my phone out fast enough to take a photo of, was a Ram 3500 tow truck. What was that doing in France? It just barely fits in the narrow lanes.

In fact, France’s cars were so different to my American eyes that my car-spotting focus shifted from what I thought would be unique European vehicles to American cars that were common stateside but genuine rarities on the roads of France and Germany. So, I found myself getting excited when I saw a Jeep Renegade and a Wrangler that had been purchased at a dealership in San Diego and then imported over at some point.

I was also fascinated by French Harley-Davidson motorcycles. French bikers are smart enough to wear a bunch of gear, but they’re no different than their American counterparts when it comes to mods. I saw and heard countless blacked-out motorcycles with loud pipes, tall bars, and just about every other mod you’d see on a summer day in Milwaukee. Heck, when I was at the resort I could have sworn that Nice sounded just like Milwaukee with the sounds of loud Harleys tearing up blacktop nearby.

All of this is to say that if you like European cars you have to get yourself over to Europe. Your brain might just fracture at the overload of Euro rides. Trust me when I say it’s so overwhelming that you’ll never be able to get all of the pictures you want.

What about driving in France? This one was a mix of the expected and the unexpected. I expected the signs to be in French and I expected the speeds to be in kilometers. I also expected the roads to be narrow. But oh boy, those expectations don’t really prepare you.

The first thing I noticed on the roads around Nice is that French drivers are very nearly lawless. Nobody obeys the speed limit, everyone just does their own thing in the country’s many roundabouts, and sometimes, it seems these drivers have little regard for their own safety.

In America, we have wide lanes, big shoulders, and runoff areas besides those. Even our cities tend to have just a little bit of buffer between the street and things you can slam your car into. France gives you no real margin for error. There aren’t shoulders, curbs come right to the edge of lanes, and rock faces sometimes jut out into your lane.

French drivers aren’t fazed by any of this. They’ll happily putt around at 100 km/h (62 mph) in an 80 km/h zone (50 mph) on roads barely wider than their cars are. Oh, and French roads are pretty wild in that they’ll just randomly reduce to 1.5 lanes or 1 lane in size without any real warning. Usually, the road gets smaller because of rocks or something, and French drivers hit these at speed, or slam their brakes at the last second when they realize their Citroën C4 Cactus isn’t fitting between the rock face and the delivery truck that’s ramming its way through. Speaking of delivery trucks and vans, their drivers don’t even bother slowing down for speed bumps, and it’s hilarious watching them bounce down the road immediately after.

Mountain roads sometimes get legitimately terrifying. Often, the only kind of guardrail you get are piles of neatly stacked bricks that won’t stop you from going over, but usually, there’s no guardrail or stops at all. It was on the mountain roads that I answered a question I’ve had for so many years: Ever since I was a kid, I wondered how Europeans keep their cars between the lines in somewhat wide cars.

The answer is they don’t, or at least, not the French drivers I saw. Most of the mountain curves I drove in the S5 were of the blind variety. I couldn’t see what was around the bend and neither could the drivers on the oncoming side. Yet, those drivers in the oncoming lane frequently crossed the center line in those blind curves. My driving partner constantly stabbed the brakes in near misses. I sometimes had to do the same, but I began to anticipate the moves of these mountain drivers and managed to squeak by without slamming the stop pedal often.

The mountains were also where I discovered that speed limits don’t exactly work the same in France as they do in America. When I drove the Lotus Emira on the Angeles Crest Highway, I faced speed limits around 40 mph to 55 mph. Most regular cars could have handled the curves at those speeds fine. In France, I saw 80 km/h speed limits on mountain passes, but switchbacks and hairpins did not support going those speeds. In America, you’d usually see a sign telling you the maximum recommended safe speed for a turn, but France seems to trust that you know you can’t actually go 80 km/h around these curves.

Combine all of this together and France was just pure chaos. Nearly everyone was speeding, nearly everyone was crossing the center line, nearly everyone was smoking, and sometimes it even seemed like red lights were a suggestion for some people.

I had to ask about this, so I talked with multiple European Audi representatives and other American journalists. The American journalists confirmed that they also had the same experiences on the road. The Audi representatives then explained to me that France is a little different than Germany. The part of France we were in wasn’t littered with cops and speed cameras, so it’s sort of controlled chaos. One bilingual local asked me if I saw any crashes. I pointed out that I didn’t and they told me that’s because French people know how to drive.

Audi’s people told me it’s very different in Germany, where the roads are more orderly, people try to be closer to the speed limits, and the country isn’t afraid to fine you using only camera evidence.

All of that aside, it was also interesting to notice just how different the infrastructure was in Europe. Here in America, we’ll build gigantic parking lots for thousands of cars. In France, there are handfuls of tiny parking lots that are always full and street parking stalls that are also always full. Two journalists in my wave somehow managed to escape to Monaco for a short time and they told me they just couldn’t find parking at all, so one guy got out and took pictures while the other guy kept driving around.

Pulling off of the road like one can do in America isn’t really a thing. The roads are so tight, you better hope there’s parking where you want to stop, or you aren’t stopping. But all of this adds to the beauty of the cities, which are unlike anything you’ll find here in America. The buildings are generally vintage if not downright historic, stuck close together, and accommodations for cars are an afterthought, not the centerpiece.

Besides, if you drive a car you’re liable to get stuck in epic traffic that makes a drive through Los Angeles seem calming. That’s why Audi didn’t even bother giving us a route to Monaco. They didn’t want us to spend most of our driving impressions noting how the S5 handles stop-and-go traffic for hours at a time.

I suppose I should also mention the other funny stuff I observed while in France. The food was about as I expected. French cuisine is loaded with butter as well as fruits and vegetables I’ve never heard of before or since. One of my meals was a tartare of some kind with a fish I don’t remember plus mangos and some plant I’ve never heard of. I generally like tartare, but this one made me want to throw up.

My favorite meal was something the resort’s restaurant called a “beef limousine,” which sounds like a great band name. The beef limousine was just a long and wide steak. And when you ask for medium rare, you’re going to get that sucker bleeding. I’m pretty sure “rare” in French terms means the meat is still breathing.

Also, don’t expect a European hotel to cater to your American self. Buy an international power adapter brick to power your devices or you’re going to be out of luck.

The people were also heartwarmingly kind. Everyone called me “madame” wherever I went and the politeness was off of the charts. Even the French equivalent of the TSA was super nice. Let’s just say I had an object in my bag that’s great for killing back pain. The French TSA guy was so cute about it, calling it “le massage gun.” Yes sir, that was a le massage gun! Sorry, Canada, I found a place that’s even nicer than you are.

Admittedly, the last time I studied French was back in middle school and I never learned German. But I do know some basic greetings, niceties, and curses in both languages. It seems that French and German folks do like it when an American at least tries to speak the language. The hilarious part is if you say something clear enough, the person you talking to might take off talking in their native tongue, which might make you audibly say oh crap, causing the other person to laugh before they realize you know just a greeting in French.

Amusingly, I also ended up in conversations in both Germany and France about my name. The German lady I talked to reminded me that my name isn’t really that of a car brand while the French guy said my name was beautiful.

I was born with a German name and I was actually excited to meet a lady who had my old name, but with an a at the end of it. I know that’s probably silly, but it was awesome to see that my old name is a real thing!

Sadly, this is about where my international report ends for now. I was in France for about all of 48 hours. Unfortunately, press events sort of lock you into an ecosystem for the duration of your time there. There isn’t really venturing off on your own. So, my exposure to French car culture was limited, but what I did see was amazing. Later, I did learn that I could have moved my flight home to a later date. Then, I could have gone on a solo adventure outside of the Audi ecosystem. Drat! I’ll have to do that next time.

And there will be a next time. This was so thrilling and so fun that I can’t just let this be where the story ends. I have a Nürburgring to race down, Chinese cars to experience, and icy cold waters to swim in. This is only the beginning.

(Images: Author. The camera was perched on the dashboard with a remote to trigger the shutter. It worked!)

(“Toto” in top graphic: Eric Isselée/stock.adobe.com)