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Durisotti

Industrial coachbuilder at Sallaumines, near Lens in the Pas-de-Calais, founded by brothers Bruno and Louis Durisotti on 15 March 1956 and France's second-largest van converter, turning out some 17,000 light commercials a year for police, postal, passenger and trade users. It militarised Land Rover Defenders for the French forces — station wagons, double cabs and a Defender 130 command post — during the 2008–2010 Defender buy.

History

Bruno and Louis Durisotti set up on 15 March 1956 at Sallaumines in the northern coalfield, repairing the coaches that carried miners' wives to the textile mills. In 1968 the firm turned to converting light commercial vehicles for the major manufacturers, and by 1972 Peugeot had it building minibuses, an early line in transport for people with reduced mobility that became one of its specialities. Over the following decades it grew into the second-largest industrial coachbuilder in France, with additional plants at Agen and Metz, and by the 2010s was converting around 17,000 vans a year across four lines of work: trade fit-outs, law-enforcement vehicles, minibuses and accessible transport.

Its Land Rover work sits in the defence line. When the French Army bought several hundred Defenders in 2008–2010 — 334 ordered in 2009, close to 550 in delivery by March 2010, in about thirty versions — Durisotti showed militarised Td4 Defenders on Land Rover's Eurosatory 2008 stand and went on to convert station wagons, double cabs and a Defender 130 command post for the armée de Terre, its badge usually sitting above the grille. The original company went into judicial restructuring on 30 January 2019 and was bought the same day by Liberty, part of the GFG Alliance; the successor filed for restructuring again on 28 April 2026, with the works still at Sallaumines after almost seventy years.

Vehicles in this registry (3)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-11T08:59:45.482Z · status: researched