Peugeot

A Workshop in Beaulieu, 1898

Walk through Beaulieu today and there is little to mark it as the birthplace of a manufacturer that would eventually claim to be the oldest in the motorcycle business. But it was here, in 1898, that the Peugeot family's two-wheel story actually starts, after a split in the family firm sent the automobile side off under Armand Peugeot and left Eugène Peugeot to pick up factory space and turn it toward motorcycles and tricycles. Sources differ on how the founding gets attributed — Wikipedia and various secondary accounts credit Armand Peugeot with starting the motorcycle venture, but the primary record from L'Aventure and auction houses like Bonhams points instead to Eugène managing the Beaulieu operation after Armand had already departed for Audincourt to run the car business, which is the version favored here. Whichever version you favor, the two threads — bicycles, cars, and motorcycles — all trace back to a family enterprise that had been making things, first coffee mills and then bicycles, since 1810.

That first machine shown at the 1898 Motor Show wasn't really a Peugeot in any meaningful mechanical sense. It carried a Dion Bouton engine mounted perpendicular to the rear wheel and never reached production. The tricycles that Les Fils de Peugeot Frères actually built that year told the same story: the cycle parts wore the Peugeot name, but the mechanicals, right down to the 239.5 cc single-cylinder engine, came from Dion Bouton. It was a common enough arrangement for the era — plenty of early manufacturers assembled machines around bought-in engines while they worked out their own — but it means the true beginning of Peugeot as an engineering concern, rather than an assembler, comes a few years later.

Finding Its Own Voice

That moment arrived in 1901, when Peugeot showed the Motobicyclette at the Paris Exhibition. This was the first machine that felt like a genuine Peugeot motorcycle: a 198cc engine sourced from Switzerland, built with the help of two Swiss engineers, Ernest Zürcher and Hermann Lüthi, producing a modest 1.5 horsepower and running through a belt final drive. It wasn't fast and it wasn't glamorous, but it worked, and it gave the company a template to build from.

The years around it were experimental in the way the whole industry was experimental. Peugeot tried quadricycles from 1900, four-wheeled machines with saddles that split the difference between motorcycle and light car, before abandoning them by 1903 as buyers increasingly wanted proper automobiles instead. On the competition side, the company entered five motorcycles producing 3.5 horsepower into the 1903 Paris-Madrid race, one of the great, brutal city-to-city contests of the age and a useful proving ground for a young manufacturer trying to establish its mechanical credibility. There is conflicting information about the company's 1914 speed record effort with a 500cc twin-cylinder machine — some accounts describe it breaking a prior 122 km/h mark, others give different figures entirely — so the precise numbers are best treated with caution rather than repeated as settled fact.

The First World War interrupted whatever momentum had built. Peugeot's contribution was practical rather than glamorous: the delivery of 1,069 motorcycles to the French Army, machines built for durability and utility rather than showroom appeal. When peace returned, the company reorganized its two-wheel operations, and in 1926 the Nouvelle Société des Cycles Peugeot was formed, bringing bicycles and motorcycles together under one roof — a structure that would carry the brand through its strongest era.

The Golden Years Between the Wars

By the 1930s, Peugeot had become the leading French motorcycle manufacturer, with a broad and increasingly sophisticated range. The 250cc P108, introduced in 1928, anchored the smaller end of the lineup and found real competition success in the Bol d'Or during the early 1930s, with riders from the Pahin family associated with strong class finishes across successive years — though the exact rider, placing, and year attributed to each result vary between sources and are not repeated here as fixed fact. At the larger end sat the 350cc P107, a machine given real public visibility through the long-distance travels of motorcyclist and journalist Robert Sexé, whose journeys did as much for the model's reputation as any advertisement could.

The most consequential machines of the period, though, were the 515 and 517, a pair of 500cc four-stroke models built explicitly to answer the big British singles and twins that were outpacing anything France had to offer. The 515 ran overhead valves, the 517 stuck with side valves, and between the two Peugeot finally had something to put against Norton, Triumph, and the rest on equal terms. The 515 backed up its engineering with a genuine achievement: shown at the 1933 Paris Motor Show, it went on to break the 24-hour world speed record on the banked Montlhéry circuit, averaging 118.747 km/h. It's worth being precise here, because sources muddy the number slightly depending on whether they're citing the 24-hour average or a related 3,000 km record — but the Montlhéry result itself stands as one of the clearest highlights of the marque's competition history.

The same period saw Peugeot absorb Automoto in 1930, a company with its own pedigree in motorcycles and scooters, folding another set of engineering talent and product lines into the growing Peugeot two-wheel business.

Racing and Reputation

Peugeot's competition record on two wheels never carried the same mythology as its early automobile racing. By most accounts, a Peugeot Type 7 won the 1895 Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race, sometimes cited as the first true car race in history, though the exact date and details are not fully confirmed and that claim belongs to the automotive side of the story rather than the motorcycle record covered here. On two wheels, the record is smaller but real: the Paris-Madrid entry in 1903, the Bol d'Or class results credited to the Pahin brothers in the early 1930s, and the Montlhéry record run of 1934. There are also accounts of a driver named Gillard taking successive victories at the Lyon, France, and Spain Grand Prix events aboard a Peugeot motorcycle, though these results are not well documented and should be read as unconfirmed rather than established. These weren't headline-grabbing grand prix campaigns in the way British or Italian marques would later run them; they were the kind of steady, technically-minded results that built a reputation for competence rather than spectacle, which suited a company that was, at its core, an industrial manufacturer first and a racing outfit second.

Where Peugeot's competitive instincts really paid off was in a market that had nothing to do with the racetrack. The 103 moped, launched in France in 1971, became a genuine phenomenon. A 49cc two-stroke throttled to 45 km/h, it was never meant to thrill anyone, but by 1977 the company was claiming it as the best-selling moped in the world, and it has since been described as the best-selling two-stroke motorcycle in history and the most-produced two-stroke two-wheeler ever built. For an entire generation of French teenagers, the 103 was their first taste of independent transport, and its commercial success arguably did more for Peugeot's two-wheel business in the postwar decades than any single racing result from the 1930s.

Ownership, Partnerships, and Survival

The structure of the Peugeot motorcycle business has shifted more than most marques of comparable age, partly because it has always sat at arm's length from the car company that shares its name. Armand Peugeot's automobile venture, founded in 1896, was eventually merged back into the family's bicycle and motorcycle operation in 1910, an early sign that the various Peugeot enterprises would keep circling back toward and away from each other for the next century.

The postwar decades saw Peugeot's two-wheel arm increasingly focused on scooters and lightweight machines rather than big-bore motorcycles, and by the early 1980s the company had entered into an alliance with Honda that reshaped its product line: Japanese two-stroke engines, variator transmissions, and electrical components found their way into Peugeot scooters, culminating in the SC of 1983, the brand's first scooter with a plastic body and an automatic gearbox. Further partnerships followed as the industry globalized — a joint venture with Jinan Qingqi in China in 2006 aimed at feeding scooters into European markets, and an arrangement with Taiwan's Sanyang Industry (SYM) in 2008 that produced models like the Tweet and LXR.

Corporate ownership has moved just as often, and the record here is genuinely tangled. Mahindra and Mahindra, the Indian industrial group, took a majority stake in the business at some point in the mid-2010s — sources put the figure and the year differently, with some describing a 51% stake acquired in 2014 and others giving different terms and dates — but the broader trajectory is not in dispute: Mahindra's initial majority position was followed a few years later, in 2019, by Mahindra taking full ownership. That chapter closed in February 2023, when control passed to the German holding company Mutares. Under Mutares, the business also expanded into new territory, acquiring DAB Motors, a boutique electric motorcycle manufacturer known for minimalist design and a premium market position — a small but telling bet that Peugeot's two-wheel future might run through electrification rather than away from it. Reports of a further ownership change, with Mutares selling the business to its own management team, have circulated but cannot be confirmed by reliable sources and should be treated as speculative rather than settled.

Peugeot Motorcycles Today

The motorcycle and scooter business now operates as Peugeot Motocycles, headquartered in Mandeure, France, and functions entirely independently of the automobile brand despite the shared badge on the tank. It's a mid-sized manufacturer by modern standards, with revenues in the range of 140 million euros, and its product focus reflects decades of market logic: scooters dominate the lineup, particularly in markets like the UK, while full-sized motorcycles occupy a much smaller corner of the business.

For collectors, the appeal of Peugeot lies less in any single glamorous racing model and more in the breadth and continuity of the story. Pre-war machines like the 515 and P108 turn up at European vintage shows and carry real historical weight as documents of French engineering in the interwar years. The postwar lightweights and the 103 moped series occupy a different kind of collector interest — less about rarity, more about cultural memory, given how many people across France actually learned to ride on one. Peugeot Motocycles is often described as the world's oldest continuously operating motorcycle manufacturer, and whatever quibbles exist over the precise founding date and the Armand-versus-Eugène question, the underlying claim holds up: this is a company that has been building two-wheeled vehicles, in one form or another, since the last years of the nineteenth century, through two world wars, multiple corporate owners, and a complete reinvention of what a motorcycle company is supposed to sell.