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 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.

Little by little Cournil now progressed from assembling Jeeps to improving them. Responding to a perceived concern over the robustness of the standard gear-box, Cournil substituted gearwheels derived from castings which he machined in his own workshops. He then started looking for an engine that would be more reliable than the ones provided from Hotchkiss, initially substituting a diesel unit from Ferguson. By the early 1960s he had decided that the Hotchkiss Jeep was insufficiently robust for the agricultural challenges of central France, and had substituted his own virtually indestructible four-wheel drive vehicle which had progressed a long way beyond the original Jeep design and which in the Mining industry acquired the soubriquet “Tracteur Cournil”. The date when Cournil is seen as having become a vehicle manufacturer in his own right lies somewhere between 1958 and 1960, and it is probably also at about this time that the business relocated from Aurillac to Saint-Germain-Laval.

A series of afterlives
The Bernard Cournil company of Saint-Germain-Laval (Loire) progressed to vehicle manufacturing in 1958 or 1960. From 1977 the vehicles were produced under licence in[Portugal by UMM. The business was acquired by the Société I.D.M.I. company in 1980 and in 1983/84 the vehicle was briefly renamed as the Autoland. In 1985 Auverland took over the business and after this the vehicle was marketed as the Auverland.