Renault's world-class wonder: the flamboyant Nervastella by Fernandez et Darrin

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The Koleos is the biggest Renault available today, and a real colossus it is, but in terms of style it's easily trumped by its 1930s counterpart, the Nervastella. With a wheelbase of 16 ft. 9 in. and height of 6 ft. 3 in., this '30s titan wasn’t only even larger; the top-of-the-range model with the straight-eight was in a league of its own for the French manufacturer, a car meant to rival marques such as Rolls-Royce, Duesenberg, Hispano-Suiza and Cadillac. It was used as a state car, too.

Naturally, there were some special bodies created by France’s finest coachbuilders. Berlines and limousines, some coupé de villes and ‘Conduite interieure Aérodynamiques’, but most extraordinary of them all had to be the ‘Coupé Chauffeur limousine’ by Carrosserie Fernandez & Darrin. Although based in Boulogne-sur-Seine, Paris, this company was founded by an American coachbuilder who’d teamed up with an Argentinian-born banker and furniture maker who already had a showroom on Paris’s avenue des Champs-Elysées. Their clientele soon included Indian royalty, the Rothschilds, Lord Mountbatten and Greta Garbo.

The most flamboyant of Nervastellas was their handiwork, featuring aerodynamically shaped wings and a closed and rounded passenger compartment of which the raked windscreen matched that of the open chauffeur’s compartment. Renault may well have been pleased with it, as similar bodies had been built on Hispano-Suiza and Rolls-Royce chassis—just the kind of cars they had in mind as their competition. But who commissioned the carrossier to build it? The huge car made it to a number of French concours in 1935, with a lady adorning it in photographs. Or are there two different ladies on the two different photographs? Note the cars' registrations, too—they're almost the same. Perhaps it wasn’t a customer car after all but one for Louis Renault himself?

There is no doubt that the Nervastella was a prestige project for Louis Renault and it seems plausible that the cars alone didn’t make him any money, but perhaps the marketing behind them did. In one of his excellent ‘Automobilia' books, author René Bellu writes: “A price reduction of 2,000 francs was available to any customer prepared to order a Nervastella with the previous year's bodywork, which could have reflected a backlog of unsold cars, or may simply indicate the high cost of the new steel presses needed to form the more subtly shaped, less slab-sided car bodies coming into fashion at this time. In addition to the standard-bodied cars, the Nervastella could still be purchased in base chassis form for the fitting of more exclusive ‘bespoke’ bodywork.”

With an unknown number of Nervastellas built up until 1937 it’s one of Renault’s rarities nowadays. That makes it even more remarkable that there’s no trace of this extravagant example now.

Words: Jeroen Booij; pictures: archive
 

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