This May Be The One Of The Best Dashboard Buttons Ever

I want to say right off the bat here that there are so many confusing things about this 1955 brochure for the Ford-Köln Versailles, Régence, and Marly. For one thing, all those names refer to the same basic car, just the different trim levels. There’s a lot more, but before we get into that, let’s just take a look at one of the most fun car dashboard buttons you can have, at least if you speak English and your car is French: the eclair button.

Yes, an eclair button! If you’re an English speaker, I would sincerely hope that your mind is conjuring up visions of pushing that button while driving, then hearing a series of whirrs and clicks behind the dashboard until what you assumed was an ashtray flops open and disgorges, messily, a delicious, creamy eclair, which drops heavily right into the palm of your open hand, hovering just below.

Or maybe you’re imagining hitting that button and hearing a series of whirrs and whines, growing faster and faster, until the center cap of that steering wheel pops open and a delicious, chocolatey eclair launches at your chest with impossible speed, impacting you right in the sternum, ejecting a mass of sugary cream all over the inside of the car as the breath is knocked out of your lungs from the force of impact.

Whatever you’re picturing, I suspect it revolves around that button providing something that looks like this:

I don’t blame you for imagining such a thing; that is, after all, what we call an eclair, the hot dog/hoagie of the French patisserie world, a delicious missile of airy choux dough, chocolate, and cream. But that, unsurprisingly, is not what eclair means in this context. “Eclair” means this:

In case your Dutch is rusty, as mine is, I’ll translate for you: it’s the knob for the lights. Literally in French “eclair” means “lightning” or a “flash” so I guess that sort of tracks, though I can’t recall another French car I’ve seen that labels its lights with the word “eclair?” I can’t recall it in Citroëns or Renaults or Peugeots, but maybe it was used on some of them? It was new to me, and, of course, struck me as funny.

But that just brings up the question of why this seeming Ford has French text on its controls in the first place? Especially in a German brochure? What’s going on here?

The reason is that car up there, a 1955 Ford-Köln Versailles is really a Simca Versailles, a very French automobile indeed. Well, maybe that’s not really true. You see, the car was derived from Ford France’s Ford Vedette, which became the Ford France Vedette. Then, the factory was sold to Simca, who wanted a car as big as the V8 Vedette, and so re-badged the car as a Simca Versailles or Régence or, in wagon form, Marly.

The Simca/Ford used an interestingly small V8 engine of 2.3 liters, making a respectable ~80 hp. I like this engine illustration in the brochure, where you can see some of the engine’s Ford Flathead V8 heritage, and also that interesting illustration of all the other stuff in the engine bay that’s not the engine, exactly, like the brake booster and battery and fuse box and I think carb and air cleaner and distributor and other stuff.

The Ford Versailles was one of the earlier cars to hide its fuel filler behind the license plate, as you see up there, in these delightfully brown illustrations that also highlight big horns, turn indicators or maybe foglamps, and windshield washers.

There’s other linguistic fun in this brochure, too, this time from German instead of French. Look at that word there, under the diagrams of the leaf spring rear suspension: Gummipuffer. That just means “rubber buffers,” which I think we’d call bushings, or maybe bump stops, but that can’t come close to matching the whimiscal charm of “gummipuffer.” It sounds like a kind of candy, or perhaps a species of comical bird.

Man, I love silly words.