Le Temps du Renouveau: The Story of Solex and Its Carburettor Factories
From Radiators to Revolution
Every great industrial story begins with a handful of visionaries. The Solex story is no different. In the 1905 alumni directory of the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures — one of France’s most prestigious engineering schools — the names of Maurice Goudard and Marcel Mennesson appear together in the same graduating class. A few pages later, in the 1910 promotion, the name of Félix Goudard follows. These three men would go on to build one of the most successful carburetor manufacturers the world has ever seen, and their legacy would be continued by their sons: André Mennesson and Francis Goudard, both likewise graduates of the École Centrale.
Their industrial partnership began in 1906 with the manufacture of centrifugal radiators for automobiles. Older Parisians may still carry a memory of the circular radiators that once adorned the buses rumbling through the arteries of their city — those distinctive components were the work of “Goudard et Mennesson.” The firm started small, first on the Rue de Montreuil, then on the Rue Fouquet in Levallois. But it was around 1910 that the decisive turning point arrived. The founders made a bold strategic choice: to pivot away from radiators and commit fully to the manufacture of carburetors. With that shift, they registered a new trademark that would echo across the automotive world for generations: SOLEX.
Building a Global Brand
By 1914, a new chapter opened. Solex moved into a purpose-built factory on the Avenue de Neuilly — a location that felt almost prophetic, planted as it was on the very road along which Paris would expand toward the Seine. From that base, the company grew steadily into a global force. Subsidiaries were established across five continents, and licensing agreements were signed with manufacturers around the world to extend the reach of the Solex brand and meet the needs of an ever-growing, ever-more-demanding clientele that came to include more than 40 automobile manufacturers, as well as dozens of producers of tractors, cultivators, marine engines, and industrial motors.
The after-sales service — the “Service Après-Vente” — became a cornerstone of Solex’s commercial philosophy, ensuring an active and effective presence in more than 90 countries. After half a century of determined effort, Solex had produced more than 60 million carburetors worldwide since 1910, with an annual delivery rate exceeding 6 million units — making it the largest carburetor manufacturer on the planet.
Why renewal was necessary
For all its success, the Neuilly plant had reached the limits of what it could offer. The pressures bearing down on the company by the early 1960s were coming from several directions at once.
The residential expansion of greater Paris had completely absorbed the surrounding area, making any meaningful factory extension physically impossible. At the same time, the automobile manufacturers who were Solex’s most loyal clients had begun a gradual migration westward, toward France’s provincial regions — relocating their production facilities while keeping their head offices and technical bureaus in the capital. Solex needed to follow its customers.
There was also the particular nature of carburetor manufacturing to consider. This is a high-precision industry, demanding highly specialized labor and skilled technicians who are both difficult to find and invaluable to retain. Solex’s working methods had always depended on close-knit teams of collaborators accustomed to operating with a high degree of individual responsibility — a culture that could not simply be uprooted and transplanted without care.
To reconcile these competing imperatives and deliver maximum productivity and quality to its clients, Solex arrived at a solution that was bold and elegant in equal measure: rather than extend or replace a single facility, the company would build two entirely new factories — each designed to serve a distinct purpose, and together forming the most advanced industrial complex dedicated to carburetion anywhere in the world.
Solex Évreux: Precision in Normandy
The first of the two new plants was established in the industrial zone of Évreux, Normandy, at 19 Rue Vulcain. Its operation was entrusted to an independent company controlled by Solex: the Société d’Usinage et de Construction Automobile et Mécanique — S.U.C.A.M. — which brought the facility into service in 1963.
The purpose of the Évreux factory is to provide Solex with powerful large-scale production capacity. Its geographic location was shrewdly chosen for exactly this reason: sitting at the crossroads of transport links connecting the Paris region with the western provinces, it is ideally placed to supply the capital while also serving the growing concentration of automobile manufacturers relocating to western France.
The building sits on a plot of two and a half hectares, with a usable floor area of 4,000 square meters. But from the outset, it was designed for growth: with careful planning, the usable surface can be extended to 10,000 square meters without causing any significant disruption to the organization of work. Expansion was built into the blueprint from day one.
Architecturally, the plant strikes a deliberate balance between industrial utility and visual appeal. The lawns and flower beds that frame the building give it a character that is unmistakably Norman, and the architect made a conscious effort not to sacrifice the elegance of the structure’s silhouette and setting to the demands of production — believing that the latter can only gain from the charm of the former. Inside, a single vast ground-floor workshop concentrates all manufacturing activity, with offices and ancillary services arranged along the main façade. The basement houses stocks, garages, a transformer station, air compressors feeding the compressed air network, a production control testing bench, and more. Outside, a 40-tonne weighbridge stands alongside a loading dock directly connectable to the national railway network.
The equipment throughout is entirely modern — some machines designed by Solex’s own engineers. Automation occupies a prominent place across the facility, and Solex’s Pneumatic Micrometers are present both on machine tools and along the assembly lines. Work here, quite literally, is conducted at the level of the micron.
Nearly the entire workforce is recruited locally, and around 80% of it is female. Carburetor manufacturing is meticulous, precise, and clean — qualities that lend themselves naturally to the dexterity and attention of women workers, who have adapted readily to the specialism and are genuinely valued within it. Management has introduced a series of thoughtful labor practices: wages and salaries paid entirely by bank transfer, no time-clock requirement, freely organized breaks morning and afternoon, and locker rooms with showers. The result is a stable, engaged workforce operating in an atmosphere that is both rational and humane — and the effects show in the quality of the work and the productivity of the plant.
Solex Nanterre: The Heart of the Operation
Where Évreux handles volume production, Solex Nanterre is the organizational and technical center of the entire enterprise. Located at 19 Rue Lavoisier on the banks of the Seine, the Nanterre facility brings together the General Management, the commercial and technical services, the research laboratories, and the precision manufacturing workshops that had previously operated from the old Neuilly site.
The newly inaugurated factory at Nanterre has a character quite distinct from its Évreux counterpart, yet it shares the same respect for its natural surroundings. Along the leafy banks of the Seine, the plant fits into its setting with a calm and comfort that belies its industrial scale. The main building covers 13,235 square meters of floor space, set within an estate of 36,000 square meters laid out in the manner of a grand garden. Its clean lines and red facing bricks, framed by white cement, give the building a sober and modern silhouette — one that the rose beds, grassy mounds, and rustling shrubs around it humanize and soften.
Construction of the Nanterre plant was a considerable engineering undertaking. The proximity of the Seine presented serious challenges from the outset. Two full years before proper construction could begin, 20,000 cubic meters of foundry sand had to be deposited across the site to neutralize the flood risk and achieve complete ground stabilization. The foundations were then laid on 850 driven piles, each sunk six meters deep. The factory floor was set at an elevation of 28.95 meters — above the highest levels ever recorded during Seine flooding — and the plant is additionally equipped with a dedicated pumping and discharge system for use in exceptional flood conditions.
The workshop buildings are structured around a 500-tonne metal frame forming 13 bays of 120 meters each. Wide internal passages allow electric trolleys to move freely throughout, and an overhead monorail conveyor serves the entire facility. Connection to the national rail network is also available when needed.
Facing the Seine, a separate two-storey structure brings together all office functions: General Management, technical, commercial, and administrative departments, as well as the drawing office. As at the old Neuilly plant, the principal services are linked by a pneumatic dispatch system. The overall arrangement is practical, carefully considered, and refined without unnecessary extravagance — an elegance of purpose rather than of show.
Inside the Workshops
The Nanterre workshops represent carburetor manufacturing at its most sophisticated. Solex produces its own tooling in-house: most of the foundry molds for its carburetors are designed and machined on site, and a dedicated workshop is responsible for the design and fabrication of the modern automated machining equipment used across the production floor. Solex builds not just its products, but the machines that build them.
The foundry operates a battery of pressure die-casting machines, producing the precision aluminum housings that form the structural core of each carburetor. These components then pass through successive stages of machining, assembly, calibration, and inspection before reaching the dispatch bays. Quality control is woven into every step of the process. Pneumatic Micrometers appear throughout, holding tolerances at the micron level. Jets are calibrated with these instruments station by station; needles are tested in batches on multi-gauge checking equipment. A dedicated super-control workshop provides a final layer of verification before carburetors are cleared for shipment. In certain areas, automated machines handle the manufacture and testing of jets without any human intervention at all.
At the end of the assembly lines, finished carburetors are flow-tested and palletized for export. Crates destined for Sweden, for Saab, move through loading bays equipped with automatic bridging platforms — a small detail that speaks to the global reach of a company whose products find their way into vehicles across the world.
The Laboratories: Where Tomorrow Is Designed
Both Nanterre and Évreux are supported by research laboratories that represent the technical nerve center of the entire organization. At Nanterre, these laboratories are positioned adjacent to the office building, separated from neighboring structures by an internal courtyard — close enough to the workshops for rapid technical intervention, yet sufficiently insulated from the noise and rhythm of production to allow careful, concentrated research.
The facilities are exceptional. Two cold chambers, each capable of reaching minus 50 degrees Celsius and large enough to contain a full-sized car, allow cold-start and extreme-condition testing to be carried out entirely in-house. Fourteen individual engine test cells — each soundproofed with cork, fibreglass, and perforated steel panels on every wall, with individual ventilation managed by extraction and blowing turbines, and with floating floor slabs to reduce vibration transmission — allow carburetors to be assessed under rigorously controlled conditions. A prototype machining workshop handles the fabrication of experimental components. Nothing has been left to chance in the pursuit of maximum effectiveness.
Special care has also been taken to protect the confidentiality of the manufacturers who entrust their engines to Solex for testing. Procedures are in place to ensure that no proprietary technical information is ever exposed.
The intellectual output of the Solex laboratories has been extraordinary over the years. The integrated choke starter and the incorporated carburetor regulator were both developed here. So were the Pneumatic Micrometer and the beloved Vélosolex — the motorized bicycle that became a fixture of French daily life — which went on to significant development at other facilities. Solex’s total portfolio of patent filings in France and abroad approaches 1,800 patents, a measure of the remarkable fertility of its research culture.
The proximity of the laboratories to the workshops is itself a form of quality assurance: technical services can intervene rapidly in production when needed, adding a further layer of security to the maintenance of quality standards.
A Complex Built for the Future
The transfer of operations to Nanterre has brought significant improvements to working conditions and to the well-being of the people who work there — and those improvements translate directly into better quality and higher productivity. Solex produces its own tooling, designs its own machines, runs its own laboratories, and trains its own people. It is an organization that has chosen, at every turn, to master its craft completely rather than delegate it.
Together, the factories at Nanterre and Évreux give Solex very broad possibilities for developing its production capacity — and in particular for doing so outside the Paris region, where the future of French industry is increasingly being written.
Solex-Nanterre and Solex-Évreux together form the most advanced industrial complex in the service of carburetion — today and tomorrow.
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It began with three engineers and a set of bus radiators on a Parisian side street. It grew, over six decades, into a global enterprise producing millions of precision instruments each year, serving customers on every continent, and filing nearly two thousand patents. And in 1965, it remade itself from the ground up — not out of necessity alone, but out of ambition, and out of a belief that the best way to honor half a century of achievement is to build something worthy of the next half century.
That is the Solex story. Le temps du renouveau — the time of renewal — was not just a slogan. It was a statement of intent.
