Small cars are different depending on where you live. Today’s other small car, a revolution in gas-guzzling America, had an engine more than three times the size of France’s equivalent.

France was in a rather different place after the Second World War though. Well, it was in the same place as it is now, but economically and infrastructurally it couldn’t have been more different from America, thanks to seeing the worst of the conflict.

The country therefore needed a small, cheap, reliable car that used the minimum of materials and ‘could cross a ploughed field’, or – we suspect more relevantly – a road network blown to bits by years of war.

With a two-cylinder engine around half a litre or less, easy maintenance, and minimal material costs, Citroen produced nearly 4 million 2CVs over a forty year production run, and – effectively – remobilised France.

This brilliant Town-scale replica of the ‘tin snail’ captures the iconic peoples’ car superbly, and it comes form previous bloggee Jonathan Elliott of Flickr. A myriad of curved plates has been deployed to capture a shape that was easy to make in metal, but fiendishly difficult to create in bricks, and bar the inappropriate tyres (get yourself some ’80s Town tyres Jonathan!) the result is about as good as it’s possible to get at this scale.

There’s more to see of Jonathan’s Citroen 2CV on Flickr, where this build and a host of other brilliant Town vehicles can be found. Click the link above to make the jump.