The rolling office
of Philippe Bouvard

A man who worked sixteen hours a day

Born on 6 December 1929 in Coulommiers, Philippe Bouvard spent more than sixty years running from one newsroom to the next: press columnist, television host, and above all the founding voice of “Les Grosses Têtes”, which he hosted on RTL from 1977 to 2014 before carrying on with “Allô Bouvard” until 2025 — retiring at 95. He worked up to sixteen hours a day, and everything in his life was organised around one obsession: never wasting a minute.

Cars were the other passion. His garage told the story of a French motoring life: a Peugeot 204, a 404, a 504 Coupé — already powered by the PRV V6 — and later even a Mercedes 600. But between Paris traffic jams and studio schedules, one problem remained: the hours lost on the road. His answer was radical, and very much his own: if the road steals your time, move the office into the car.

A 604 unlike any other

The base car was itself a rarity. Unveiled at the 1978 Paris Motor Show, the 604 Limousine was built by coachbuilder Heuliez in its Cerizay workshops: a flagship 604 cut open and stretched by 62 centimetres — the one of the four stretches studied with Peugeot (17, 25, 62 or 98 cm) chosen for production — every one of those centimetres going into the wheelbase, for a total length of 5.34 metres. After a long homologation process it joined the official Peugeot catalogue in 1980, and only about 124 were built until production ended in the summer of 1984. Ministries, companies and heads of state were the intended clientele.

Under the bonnet, the limousine kept the top petrol engine of the range: the PRV V6 in its ZMJ version — 2,664 cc, Bosch K-Jetronic injection, 144 bhp — the same unit as the 604 Ti and STI. Pushing around 1.6 tonnes of stretched steel and walnut through Paris required exactly what the Douvrin V6 did best: smoothness, silence, and effortless torque. A handful of turbo-diesel examples were also built on request, but Bouvard's car was a V6 — of course it was.

The rolling office

What made Bouvard's limousine unique was everything Heuliez fitted behind the glass driver partition. Walnut burl tablets. Directional reading lights, so he could correct his page proofs at night. A typewriter fixed to a mahogany tablet. A television and a video recorder. An electrically retractable desk. And the rarest piece of all: a 150 MHz radiotelephone, at a time when the PTT allocated these lines sparingly — a privilege that turned the rear bench into a genuine branch office of his newsrooms.

The car worked as hard as its owner. A chauffeur and two secretaries took turns aboard: while Paris slid past the windows between Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Grands Boulevards, Bouvard dictated, the secretary typed, the telephone answered. Chronicles, radio scripts, book pages — a share of what France read and heard from him in those years was produced on the rear bench of a 604, above a PRV V6 idling through traffic.

The guided tour — by the owner himself

The rolling office was famous enough for television to come and film it. On 8 October 1990, in the FR3 show “Zapper n'est pas jouer”, Philippe Bouvard himself gave Vincent Perrot the guided tour of his office car: the work surface, the radiotelephone, the radio set, the television and its VCR, the clock — and, the INA notice specifies, the possibility of sleeping in it. The association has shared this archive on its YouTube channel; it is worth every one of its two minutes.

From the Paris pavement to the Sochaux museum

In 1998, Philippe Bouvard chose the most elegant retirement possible for his limousine: an official donation to the Aventure Peugeot association. The car left the Paris streets for the collections of the Musée de l'Aventure Peugeot in Sochaux (Doubs), where it is still displayed today with its period fit-out intact — typewriter, telephone and desk in place, exactly as it worked. It even came back to Paris for Rétromobile in 2004, shown as what it is: not just a rare limousine, but the portrait of its owner in sheet metal.

Philippe Bouvard passed away on 24 August 2026, at 96. Somewhere in Sochaux, a stretched 604 with a PRV V6 under the bonnet keeps his office open. From all of us at PRV Concept: thank you, Monsieur Bouvard.