Small, cheap, and weird: A history of the microcar

European car manufacturers are currently tripping over themselves to figure out how personal transport and "last mile" solutions will look in the years to come. The solutions are always electric, and they're also tiny. What most companies (bar Citroen, Renault, and Fiat) seem to have forgotten is that we've had an answer to this problem all along: the microcar.

 

The microcar is a singular little thing—its job is to frugally take one person (or maybe two people) where they need to go while taking up as little space as possible. A few have broken their way into the public consciousness—Top Gear made a global megastar of Peel's cars, BMW's Isetta remains a design icon, and the Messerschmitt KR200 is just plain cool—but where did these tiny wonders come from? And do they have a future?

 

Well, without the microcar's predecessors, we may not have the modern motorcar as we know it. Sort of.

 

Let's roll back to the genesis of the car: the Mercedes-Benz Patent Motorwagen. While not a microcar by any means (though it seats only two people and has a tiny engine and only three wheels), it got plenty of people thinking.

 

While Karl Benz was inventing the car and his wife was road-tripping it in 1885, a French inventor named Léon Bollée put his thinking cap on. He was 15 at the time, but it gave him time to be with his thoughts. At that age, he had a keen brain—one that invented a pedal boat of sorts. Bollée was smart, to say the least—he built calculators to help his father's business, one of which won an award at the 1889 Paris Exposition and went on to be patented all over the world.

 

In 1895, Bollée and his father created "La Novelle," a steam-powered trike, and in the same year, Bollée created a gasoline-powered… thing as well. A year later, Bollée founded Léon Bollée Automobiles to mass-produce his tiny cars, dubbing them "Voiturette"—a mashup of the French for automobile (voiture) and the suffix you throw on a word to make it small (ette). Small car, basically.

 

A few years later, Renault (maker of tiny hatchbacks and the gloriously silly Avantime and popularizer of the people carrier in Europe) became a car manufacturer with the release of its descriptively named Voiturette. Louis Renault's small mechanical wonder was built in 1898, and the first was sold on Christmas Eve of the same year to a friend of Louis' father—he liked the fuel economy from its one-cylinder De Dion-Bouton 273 cc 1.75 hp (1.3 kW) engine and the fact that it could get around town with ease.

 

That same night, the story goes, Renault sold a further twelve cars. Over its mere five-year production run, the first Renault went from open-top two-seater to a four-seat covered wagon capable of over 35 mph (56 km/h). Bear in mind that less than a century earlier, Stephenson's Rocket and its almost 30 mph (48 km/h) top speed caused great concern about whether human physiology could withstand such speeds. 35 mph was quite the achievement.

 

Voiturettes and their less "ette" siblings were very successful, but they were a bit too much for some people. That's where the cyclecar came in.

 

First appearing around 1910, cyclecars took small engines—single cylinders, V-twins, the odd four-pot—and attached them to simple, lightweight four-wheeled bodies. To be a cyclecar, a vehicle had to have a gearbox and clutch. A huge industry popped up around them, and for good reason—regular cars were expensive to tax and run, whereas a cyclecar wasn't.

 

A formal decision by the Federation International des Clubs Moto Cycliste gave the cyclecar a classification. Small cyclecars could weigh no more than 331 lbs (150 kg) and have an engine no bigger than 0.75 L. Its tires could have a minimum 55 mm section. Large cyclecars could weigh up to 772 lbs (350 kg) and have a 1.1 L motor, and the smallest section tire it could wear was 60 mm.

 

To say the cyclecar was a hit is something of an understatement. Small manufacturers popped up all over the world to make teeny tiny cars to move the masses gently around their respective countries. They had twee names like Dudley Bug (only 100 made), the Wooler Mule, Izaro, and Cyklonetka. People could move around without getting covered in horse waste, and they weren't charged an arm and a leg for the privilege.

 

As time passed, bigger, more practical, faster cars became more affordable. Henry Ford saw how a cow went in one end of a meatpacking plant and came out the other in bits, then figured out how to mass-produce cars for a fraction of the cost of his competitors. All of a sudden, the cyclecar seemed a bit out of style. Why would consumers pay for a small, wobbly handmade thing from a shed when they could have a Ford Model T, an Austin 7, or a number of others? Almost as quickly as the cyclecar arrived, it was gone. Still, a decade in the limelight is better than nothing at all.

 

Of the many that hopped on the bandwagon at the time, few survived, and if they did, they aren't household names. The UK's Morgan Motor Company managed to make it through—were it not for HFS Morgan's desire to get around the Malvern Hills cheaply, his Three Wheeled Runabout might not have kick-started over a century of quirky British sports cars (a version of which you can still buy today in the Super Three—it's not particularly affordable or practical, but it is fun).

The conditions were ripe for a bubble

The cyclecar was gone but not forgotten. In the middle of the 20th century, war struck, and when it was over, things weren't rosy for those who remained. Economies were trashed, the populace had no money, and nations were rebuilding. The knock-on effect was that, once again, people needed a way to get around on a budget. Meet the darlings of the '50s and '60s: Bubblecars—so named because they looked like little bubbles as they went along.

 

Germany's efforts were many, and some manufacturers who had previously made airplanes found themselves with time on their hands after the war, which is why the Messerschmitt KR175 and Heinkel Kabine have potentially familiar names.

 

Messerschmitt's efforts were sweet things. "KR" stands for "Kebineroller," basically a scooter with a cabin, and the KR200, a follow-up to the cute but flawed KR175, took the world by storm in its own way. It was cheap, at 2,500 DM (about $6,972 today), and over 12,000 were built in its first year (over 41,000 were produced during its near-decade-long run). Its tiny 191 cc 10 hp (7.5 kW) motor gave it a top speed of 56 mph (90 km/h), and hydraulic shocks gave it an oddly smooth ride. Well, as smooth as a 507 lb (230 kg) tube on wheels could be.

 

BMW's front-opening Isetta is perhaps the most famous of the era, though it started out as an Iso instead of a BMW. The Iso Isetta came with a tiny 236 cc 9.5 hp (7 kW) motorcycle engine and looked like a happy little egg. It was made because Iso's owner thought it would be a good idea to get into the tiny car game after making refrigerators, tiny trucks, and scooters. It was a comparative hit in its home territory, but when the Fiat 500c came along and people lost interest in the tiny egg, Iso wanted to work on its Rivolta sports car, so the firm went looking for licensing deals. And boy, did it find them—versions of the Iso Isetta ended up in France, Argentina, Brazil, and Germany.

 

The German Isetta isn't a like-for-like copy of the original. BMW is a German company, so it decided to reengineer much of the vehicle—it had a new engine, for one thing—to make it a touch more palatable for its market. Over its life, it was revised, fettled, and even extended to add extra seats and wheels to make it a family car in the form of the BMW 600. There was a British version of the BMW Isetta, which swapped things around to make it more digestible for the tea-drinking market. The British car came in RHD three-wheeled flavor (other Isettas had two tiny rear wheels), which boosted its popularity thanks to legislation that meant a motorcycle license was all you needed to drive cars with the wrong number of wheels. Very, very technically, it was a motorcycle—just one with a steering wheel (see also: Reliant Robin).

 

While modern microcars aren't as big a deal as they were in the days of yore, you can still find plenty of them if you know where to look. Rural France is often a treasure trove of microcars, as is Spain, where you'll be dazzled by tiny Axiams, Ligiers (yes, the same Ligier as used to race in Formula 1), and more. A delve into their respective websites is a thing of joy. Modern microcars come with exciting wheels, spoilers, rear diffusers, touchscreens, decent sound systems, and other modern conveniences to ensure that your up-to-20-hp motor is as indistinguishable from a regular motor as possible… to a point. A quadricycle's crash regulations aren't as stringent as those for a "proper" car, and you won't find yourself cooing at material quality. For not much money, at age 16, who cares about plastic trim, anyway?

 

Cities like London and Paris can be good hunting grounds, too. Big cities tend to favor the likes of the electric Renault Twizy and Citroen Ami (the latter is a "light" quadricycle, which can irk other road users because it doesn't go exactly 30 mph).

 

The French pair are wonderful examples of the breed. The Twizy went out of production in 2023, but it enjoyed an 11-year run all over Europe. A bizarre pod with outboard wheels, it could seat two people in tandem (a cargo version ditched the rear chair in favor of a load bay), and it had doors that opened upward. It also didn't have windows as standard—there were optional plastic sheets that zipped up for rainy climes. It had over 50 miles (80 km) of range, which made it perfect for city living.

 

Citroen's Ami is still available for sale and is a masterwork of clever cheapness. Its front and rear panels are the same, but with clear lamps up front and red lights at the back. Its doors are the same, too, which means one opens the normal way and the other in "suicide" style. It comes with a USB port for charging your phone, a very noisy fan to demist the windshield, and a hole in the dash to pop a Bluetooth speaker in if you want to listen to something other than the road as you drive. Retailing at less than $11,500 in the UK, it's not cheaper than a used hatchback, but its tiny 5.5 kWh battery will take you to the store and back, so long as there aren't any hills and the supermarket isn't more than a 40-mile (64 km) round trip. The Ami is unrelentingly cool in a cheap and cheerful sense, and it brings joy to anyone who sees one.

 

From the dawn of the motorcar to today, the microcar has fought on. Whether as a cheap means of getting the masses around or as a way to village-hop in rural France, there always seems to be a place for them, even though they're not as popular as they used to be. More microcars will come in time—electrification allows for small batteries with decent punch, and more relaxed crash regulations mean design teams can stretch their fingers in more interesting ways.

 

And, hey, who doesn't like the idea of whirring around town at 28 mph in a tiny plastic Citroen box? Last-mile transportation could still be fun enough to take the long way home.