Cournil

Bernard Cournil was a French vehicle maker who progressed from improving other people’s vehicles to manufacturing his own during the late 1950s. Rights to manufacture his design were subsequently held by a succession of businesses in Portugal after the French creator of the vehicle had disappeared from the picture. The vehicle built was also called the Cournil, and was intended mainly as an all-round offroad vehicle especially suited for farm usage: it could pull a plow and was offered with a PTO, cranes, or even machine gun mountings.

The man

Bernard Cournil was born in Aurillac in April 1909. He was a passionate engineer and, as a young man, closely involved with the Tour de France, before returning to his native Cantal where he set up an automobile workshop business which as the next war progressed and the oil ran out, specialised in converting cars to run on wood based “gazogène” fuel.

Improving the Jeep

After the war Cournil found a stock of US built Jeeps that had been left behind, and these he adapted and maintained for agricultural use. When Hotchkiss began to assemble Jeeps under license in France, it was a natural progression for Cournil to become a regional distributor for the Hotchkiss built Jeep, and in 1954 he went a stage further, concluding his own licensing agreement with Willys Jeep for assembling their vehicle.