It’s all a matter of perspective.
When we first picked our rental car up at the airport, my first impression of it was that it was so cute. And little. And thank goodness there were only four people who had to get into it.
I was, of course, comparing it to the sorts of cars we all encounter in North America on a daily basis.
But then I had to drive from the airport to our hotel in Bordeaux, and that’s when I learned that French roadways are in general much less forgiving than our roadways. What passes for a high speed motor route in France would be relegated to a tertiary county road at best. More often, our travels around France were on roads that would be deemed too narrow to be someone’s driveway here.
A few other things I noticed about motorways in France:
Straight lines are somewhat abhorrent. Rarely did I travel on a road that I wasn’t 
weaving and swerving constantly. Whereas in the states, if someone wanted to build a road that went from point a to point b, they would typically remove the obstacles in the way and level out the hills somewhat, in France, they would not. If there were an old tree smack dab in the middle of point a and point b, you can bet your sweet Citroen that the road would swerve wildly around the tree.
Navigating France without a GPS or without your own personal private Sherpa would be a fool’s errand. Although there are plenty of signs at intersections, I noticed that they were all in French. Which I don’t speak or read very well. Also, I could make out signs pointing toward towns, but if I was going seven towns down the road, these would not have helped me, as only the next town down the line was usually labeled. And forget about relying on a good old fashioned sense of direction. By the time I was finished navigating around the various natural obstacles, I was so turned around, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you North from down. It was like playing 3 card monty, only if you got this wrong, you weren’t out $10 – you were outside in the middle of nowhere.
In general, there are very few cars on the roads in France. Even out in the sticks here in Pennsylvania, in the middle of the day on a semi major route, you should expect to see hundreds of cars bustling about. There, if I saw more than five cars an hour out of the center of a town, it was a statistical anomaly. Here, we live in the sticks and work in the towns so we’re constantly commuting somewhere – to work, to soccer practice, to Sam’s Club. There, it didn’t seem that way. It seemed like people pretty much stayed within walking or biking distance of their homes most of the time.
Anything passes for a roadway. As we would walk around in France, Mrs. P was constantly grabbing my arm and dragging me out of the middle of the road. Because their roads look like our walking paths, it just didn’t occur to me to look for cars. Even our GPS had a hard time telling what was a road and what wasn’t. Two cases in point – trying to get to the hotel in Bordeaux, our GPS kept insisting that I turn right down a dark alleyway. But I know better, that’s not a road, so we went the other way instead. And the GPS flipped out. We circled back several times before we finally parked the car in frustration and set out to find the hotel on foot. So, that dark alleyway? That was the road the hotel was on. Case two – the GPS directed us one day to take a road into old Sarlat we hadn’t taken before. It looked like a walkway, but hell, most roads there do. At a T intersection, we realized that one way led to a narrow low overpass that our car wouldn’t fit under, and the other led to a flight of stairs. Now, I have seen the Bourne movies, and I always thought it was a hell of a stunt when they drove that little car down the stairs, but it wasn’t until this moment that I realized that it wasn’t a stunt…
There are precious few traffic lights. This is probably a direct consequence of having so few cars on the road, but in general, when encountering an intersection in the boonies in France, you do not see traffic lights. You may see a traffic circle, or it may be a more traditional intersection, but people just sort of seem to know the rules of right of way, and unlike my compatriots here in America, they follow them. At one point, we saw a car approach a fork in the road where it came to a full stop as the driver perused all of the directional indicators on the sign before opting to take the left fork. No horns honked. No fists waved. Imagine if someone came to a full stop on a road here.
And now, a word about cars.
Probably in part because their roads are so small and probably in part because they have more incentives to go green, French automobiles are much smaller than the ones you would find in North America. But it isn't just that they're smaller. They're also much funkier
Back in the 80's, I read an issue of Car and Driver in which they featured a collection of cars from behind the iron curtain. They were strange and alien, and a wee bit ugly. I felt like those pages, with a little creative input from Richard Scarry, had come to life.
There were Fords, but not Fords like you're used to seeing. And there were Toyotas and Hondas too. But mostly, there were Citroens, SMART cars, Peugeots, Renaults, Opels, Fiats, and little things called Microcars. We would see piles of people bunched into these things, like a clown act from the circus. And at first, I thought that some 
of these were really really old. Until I saw brand new ones in the dealership window.
