While best known here in the States as the man who teamed up with Henry  Ford to build and sell FoMoCos in France, Emile Mathis had a much more detailed, nuanced and altogether interesting life in automobiles outside of his involvement with old Hank. In fact, he only remained involved with Ford from 1935 to 1938, before which time he had his own semi-successful automotive line.
But after selling his shares of Matford, he seemed displaced. He tried to build marine engines in the States under the Matam name, but after World War II, he returned to Europe, where he began work on what would have been a fairly revolutionary car. He called it the VL 333 - which stood for voiture legere, three liters of fuel consumed for every 100 kilometers, three wheels and three seats. It had a unibody structure, a Jean Andreau-designed body and front-wheel drive with a front-mounted 700cc flat-twin engine.
Mathis shopped the VL 333 around, but couldn’t convince the French government to allow him to produce it (sources don’t say whether he found anybody who actually wanted to produce it). It appears he made just the one VL 333 pictured above.
Oddly enough, he tried once more the year after, at the age of 67, to build a new car, which he called the 666 (six cylinders, six-seater, six speeds). Seven years later, he sold his factory to Citroen. Two years after that, he “fell” from a hotel window.
Somebody needs to build a modern replica of the VL333.
Source: Beaulieu Encyclopedia of the Automobile, Volume 2
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