Biography|Vincent Rambaud — The Last Panhard Works at Marolles

People remember Panhard as a vanished Paris car maker on avenue d'Ivry.

By 2002 the civilian cars were long gone.

What remained inside PSA was a military works at Marolles-en-Hurepoix, in the Essonne, on a plot bought in 1971 and opened in 1973 beside the Paris-Orléans railway.

The street still carries the founders' names: rue Panhard et Levassor.

Émile Levassor had been born in the same commune in 1843.

Rambaud was named directeur général of Panhard et Levassor in 2002, his first PSA command after the Lyon foundry.

The legal shell was then the Société de constructions mécaniques Panhard-Levassor, a PSA subsidiary with its siège still listed at 18 avenue d'Ivry and its production at Marolles.

The plant built wheeled armour, including the VBL and the later ERC-90 Sagaie line that had replaced the older AML series.

This is the factory he actually directed, not the demolished Porte d'Ivry halls where Panhard once assembled cars.

He left Marolles in 2005 for GEFCO, PSA's logistics arm.

The works outlived his tenure.

Panhard's name stayed on the front until the brand was folded into Arquus in 2018, and the same site remains a defence plant.

A visitor finds an active industrial fence, not a museum.

The pin is the Marolles street of the factory, a few dozen metres from the rails.

The photograph is a VBL, the light armoured vehicle that plant made, not a portrait of the man.

Rambaud's public life after 2005 moved to logistics, then Brazil, then the Peugeot brand.

The Marolles years are the only stretch in which he ran a weapons factory that still stood, under the oldest name in French motoring, inside a group that no longer sold Panhard cars.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons file Véhicule Blindé Léger, CC BY-SA 4.0. The vehicle is the product of the Marolles works, not a photograph of the sheds themselves.