Automoto

Origins in Saint-Étienne

Walk through Saint-Étienne at the turn of the last century and you would have heard hammers and lathes running late into the evening. The city was France's industrial engine room for firearms, ribbon-weaving, and increasingly, bicycles — and it was here that a group of local businessmen put their names to a new marque called Automoto. By most accounts the founders were Montet (or Louis) Chavanet, Claudius Gros, and a Monsieur Pichard; some accounts also name a Pierre Lapertot, though his involvement doesn't show up independently outside a couple of secondary sources and is hard to confirm. What's solid is the trademark: Gros, Goudefer, and Pichard registered the Automoto name in 1898 for the sale of cycle and voiturette components, and the following year, in 1899, the formal company was registered as Chavanet, Gros, Pichard et Cie, with a machine wearing the marque's clover-leaf badge appearing at the Paris Salon under that banner. There is conflicting information about an earlier date — some sources point to an informal partnership taking shape in the summer of 1889 — but it isn't clear whether that refers to an actual business arrangement or just early acquaintance among the founders, and the documented, trademarked company story really begins at the close of the 1890s.

Before it built a single motorcycle worth remembering, Automoto was building tricycles that looked suspiciously like those coming out of De Dion-Bouton's works. Baron De Dion, never a man to let an imitator pass unremarked, sued. He lost. It's a small episode, but it tells you something about the company's early character: scrappy, technically literate, and unbothered by the shadow of bigger names. Alongside the tricycles, the firm also advertised quadricycles and voiturettes, hedging its bets across the whole spectrum of early motorized transport before settling into cycles and motorcycles as its real business.

The Early Machines

The first decades of the twentieth century saw Automoto grow from a Saint-Étienne workshop into a serious industrial concern. By 1914 the company was thriving, fitting its machines with some of the most advanced and powerful engines available at the time. That ambition came at a price — literally. Automoto motorcycles cost more than most of the competition. But the reputation held up, and buyers kept coming, drawn by machines that were built to a standard rather than to a budget.

The First World War knocked the wind out of the company, as it did to most of the French motor industry. Restarting motorcycle production afterward proved difficult, and for a few years Automoto leaned hard on its bicycle business to keep the lights on. It worked. By 1923 the firm had rebuilt a solid market position on the strength of its pedal-cycles, buying itself time to bring the motorcycle side back to health.

The Golden Era

The 1920s and 1930s were Automoto's real years, the period a collector today would point to first. The model range before the 1939 war spanned two-strokes from 100 to 250cc and four-strokes from 175 to 500cc, and by 1929 the catalog had grown wide enough to include the A12, A9, A14, A15, and the A16 through A18 family — 175cc up to 350cc machines, built with engines sourced from Peugeot, Zurcher, Chaise, and Blackburne alongside Automoto's own units. This was standard practice for French makers of the era, who often bought in engines from specialist suppliers like J.A.P. and Villiers rather than casting everything in-house, and Automoto used the approach to offer a genuinely broad range without overextending its own foundry.

What set the marque apart, according to the people who rode and sold them, was the finish. Automoto built what were considered high-class, sturdy motorcycles — machines meant to be owned for years, not traded in after a season. On the racing calendar the company ran in violet, and it lined up as one of the largest French marques in the great road races of the period, keeping company with Peugeot, Hurtu, Alcyon, Clément, and La Française — the roll call of Saint-Étienne and the wider French industry at its most competitive.

Racing and the Tour de France Years

Here the story splits in an interesting way. Automoto's motorcycle racing record from this period is thin in the surviving literature — the company was clearly a serious entrant in the major motorcycle races of the day, but detailed results have not survived in a form historians can point to with confidence. What is extremely well documented, and arguably the proudest chapter in the whole Automoto story, is what its cycling team did on two unpowered wheels.

From 1923 through 1926, Automoto-sponsored riders won the Tour de France four years running. Henri Pellissier took the win in 1923. Ottavio Bottecchia, riding for Automoto, won in both 1924 and 1925 — a rider whose story has since taken on its own mythology in cycling circles, quite apart from the marque that equipped him. Lucien Buysse closed out the run in 1926. Four consecutive Tour victories, across three different riders of three different nationalities, is not a small thing for any manufacturer, and it says something about the depth of Automoto's competition program that it could produce winners year after year rather than a single flash of form. For a company that also built motorcycles, the crossover in engineering culture and brand prestige between the pedal side and the motor side would have been impossible for buyers to ignore.

Landmark Models

The late 1920s catalog remains the clearest window into what Automoto was capable of at its peak: the A14 at 220cc, the A15 at 250cc, the A16 through A18 at 350cc, and the A19 at 175cc, all offered around 1929 and running into the early 1930s. These were the bread-and-butter machines that built the company's reputation for sturdiness over flash.

After 1945, with the prewar engine suppliers scattered or diminished, Automoto shifted its reliance to A.M.C. for overhead-valve units between 125 and 250cc, and to Aubier-Dunne for its two-stroke range. The postwar 125cc models are particularly associated with the Villiers 10D engine, a unit introduced in 1948 and widely used across the European lightweight motorcycle industry — a sign that Automoto, like many French makers rebuilding after the war, was pragmatic about sourcing rather than precious about building everything under its own roof. It was smaller, plainer motorcycling than the 1920s heyday, aimed at a France that needed cheap, reliable transport rather than prestige machinery.

Ownership, Decline, and the Long Goodbye

Automoto's independence effectively ended in 1930, when the company joined the Peugeot group — though at least one source places the date a year later, in 1931, and the exact terms of that arrangement are less documented than the fact of it. From that point on, Automoto operated within Peugeot's orbit rather than as a free-standing manufacturer, one of several historic French marques Peugeot gathered up as the interwar industry consolidated.

The corporate paper trail afterward reads like a slow contraction: Chavanet, Gros, Pichard et Cie through 1918; then the SA des Constructions Mécaniques de la Loire in Saint-Étienne through the interwar years; then, after the Second World War, the Société Automoto operating out of Paris; then, from 1951, a joint operation as Terrot-Automoto based in Valentigney in the Doubs, pairing Automoto with another historic French name. In 1959, Indénor — a Peugeot subsidiary — purchased both the Automoto and Terrot marks outright, though production did not stop overnight: motorcycle and bicycle assembly continued for a couple more years on existing lines rather than with fresh models being developed. That assembly work ran on until around 1961, and the final cessation of production is dated to July 1962, by which point Automoto was among the last of the old-guard French marques still standing at all, even if only in name.

The Marque Today

Automoto has not built a motorcycle in over sixty years, and there is no company today trading meaningfully on the name. What survives is the machines themselves, and the people who go looking for them — the 1920s and 1930s models in particular, with their proprietary and bought-in engines and their reputation for solid construction, turn up at French auctions and enthusiast gatherings with some regularity, and postwar 125cc Villiers-engined models occasionally cross the block as well. Collectors value them not for spectacular performance but for what they represent: a Saint-Étienne firm that built to a standard rather than a price, and that, almost as a footnote to its motorcycle business, happened to equip four straight Tour de France champions in the 1920s. That combination — solid, unglamorous engineering paired with a genuinely remarkable run in professional cycling — is what keeps the Automoto name alive among people who study this period of French motoring rather than just collect it.