>>> (and I drove Citroën 2CV and a Renault 4 and a bit of Renault 14) were very comfortable, held the road well and ran quite fine, despite the smallish engines.
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>>I drove both those cars (Citroën 2CV and a Renault 4) and were fun, but I would not call them comfortable :D In the 2CV (at the moment a 30 years old car, 1960 model or so), which apparently was not known much in Brazil, we drove from Buenos Aires to some south Brazilian beaches, some 5000 km round trip) and we were stopped by some road police, who were trying to fine us for not wearing seat belts, so my friend, who was driving at the moment, pointed to the roof and told him "and where do you think the seat belts should be attached to? To the roof?" (the roof is a cloth roof, not metallic, for those who do not know the car) The policemen laughed and let us continue, to one of the better vacations I had :D Unfortunately, even thou the car was good in gas consumption, every time we filled the gas tank, we needed to buy and feed the beast with motor oil, so the trip was more expensive of what we thought and we could not reach Rio de Janeiro :(
>
>Yeah and I forgot to say the car was loads of fun :). The 2CV is basically an umbrella on four wheels (as they called it in the beginning), and is the only car in the world which looks equally charming before and after a fender bender.

As you probably know,the 2CV stands for Deux chevaux, or 2 HP :-) Also named "The tin snail" over here.
How about the old Citren Dianne and Aimie - you very rarely see them nowadays.

>The R4, OTOH, looks as if it was designed with a spade. The ultimate insult to a R4 driver is when a passenger confuses the shift handle (which sticks out of the middle of the dashboard) with an umbrella handle.

It was similar in the old Renault 4s. The French cars were a joke back in the day - very quirky and non-standard. As if they'd said "Right, the rest of the world's gone in for H-gate gear shifts - we'll adopt a style reminiscent of operating a trombone
:-)

I once got to drive an old Renault Dauphine, which did have an H gate (of sorts) only, when putting it into 1st or 2nd (R-H drive) you had to stray so far over into the passenger's side as to nearly emasculate him! :-)