The plan, applied in a way that some viewed as authoritarian and arbitrary, defined complementary roles for seven of the larger manufacturers: Berliet, Citroën, Ford SAF, Panhard, Peugeot, Renault and Simca.
Citroën and Renault were both considered powerful and large enough to operate autonomously, but Peugeot were required to link up with Hotchkiss, Latil and Saurer for the production of commercial vehicles.
That left Peugeot with the middle-sized cars, while Simca, owned by a foreign company, was also able to escape the model planning of the civil servant.
In the late 1940s aluminium was therefore available and relatively inexpensive, while the sheet steel which most automakers needed for their car bodies was in desperately short supply.
North America had plenty of customers willing and able to spend money on new cars, but it also had powerful domestic auto producers, and in volume terms during the early years following the Second World War, at least until Mercedes-Benz made a serious return, imported British producers of luxury and sporting cars tended to outperform other European auto-makers in North America.
Ironically, bombing had been rendered the more damaging because Matthis had handed over the plans of the factory to the Americans in order that they might more effectively destroy what was, during the war, a German manufacturer of military motors and munitions.
By 1948, Mathis was exhibiting a modern six cylinder sedan/saloon called the Type 666 at the Paris Motor Show, but for small manufacturers there was nothing optional about the Pons Plan, because government controlled supplies of the raw materials – above all the steel – needed to produce cars.
[5] In the end Mathis was forced to abandon his plans to return to auto-making, and the productive assets of his Strasbourg plant were sold to Citroën in 1953.
Less combative than Émile Mathis, the directors of Corre La Licorne seem nevertheless to have shared his view that the Pons Plan could be ignored or circumvented once the immediate pressures of post war political interventionism had subsided.