In 1965 I took my driving test in a BMW 600, the two-cylinder big brother to the Isetta. Here's a photo of the car and the rest of my family's fleet of cars and motorcycles as of 1966: https://imgur.com/a/ria9buN
If you are into this kind of machines, there is a nice auction sale in a few days: https://www.classicdriver.com/en/auction/dorotheum-sammlung-... => most of those cars are really surprising, even though I've already seen some in real life at car events, it's engineering optimised and minimised!
My maths school teacher had one of these. It did not seem that unusual at the time even though there were few on the roads. Nobody laughed at him for having such a 'car' and we were well versed as school kids at picking on people.
I wish cars could be more like the Isetta and less like tanks. With driver aids such as ABS and the like we could have electric cars like the Isetta with safe roads. However the horse has left the gate on that and we are doomed to a future of vehicles built like tanks.
Small vehicles have been killed by regulation. No chance to build a two-stroke engine anymore, at least for a car. Expensive crash test regs. Noise and pollution regs. And, if you do electric, heavy batteries.
You may be correct about crash and other safety regulations, but the BMW Isetta was powered by a 250cc single cylinder four stroke engine adapted from a motorcycle. That class of engines is quite alive and kicking, they have substantially increased in power output in the mean time.
This immediately reminds me of the Top Gear feature on the smallest car in the world: the Peel P50 - the relatively behemoth-like Bubble Car (Isetta) makes a fleeting appearance in the introduction.
And less obvious ones, like https://www.ellenator-gmbh.de/ which exists solely to exploit a legal loophole to get something that is arguably more dangerous than a car into the hands of people who are not licensed to drive a car.
I've never driven a quadricycle, but I have heard from someone that they are actually harder to drive than an actual car. I think it was mostly due to its transmission.
Then there's the fact that they offer pretty much no crash protection and they can be legally operated starting at the age of 15. They are definitely dangerous.
There was an incident where an older Mercedes-Benz minivan [1] crashed into a quadricycle [2] in 2017. The 34-year-old man driving the minivan was drunk and suicidal and attempted to kill himself by crashing himself to an oncoming car. The result was that the two 17-year-olds in the quadricycle died immediately and the man got minor injuries.
> Der Ellenator ist der erste PKW, der mit 16 Jahren gefahren
> werden darf, da er trotz 4 Räder als „Dreirädriges Fahrzeug“
> Fahrzeugklasse L5e eingestuft ist.
> The Ellenator is the first car that may be driven at the age
> of 16, because it is classed as a "three-wheeled vehicle" in
> vehicle class L5e despite having four wheels.
Registering a four-wheeled car according to regulations for three-wheeled cars sounds like exploiting a loophole to me.
The front seats can be mounted on top of a rigid structure that's pushed back in case of a front collision, giving enough crumple space. The lack of side doors make that solution much easier, allowing a rigid sliding cage around the passengers. The anchoring of the cage can be at the middle of the front of the car, pulling it to crumple inwards, absorbing more energy from the impact and building a denser structure in front of the passengers.
A motorcycle has the distinct advantage you don't remain inside it during the collision, but continue on a ballistic trajectory from the point you separate from the vehicle.
I didn't know that Doug DeMuro had done an episode on the Isetta. I love his presentation. His geeky joy in driving any car, whether ultra luxury, or just plain odd, is infectious.
Much of the extra weight in the modern car is due to safety and environmental mitigation equipment. All of those crash cages, crumple zones, airbags and the like add weight and size. So do things like complex fuel management systems and catalytic converters. Of course, these are well worth it in added safety and cleaner emissions, but they do limit the minimum size and weight. And that's before one gets to all the "extra options", that are often not optional any more.
Weight is optional. A new Miata weighs exactly as much as a 1998, only 200lb more than a 1989. An entire 2020 Honda Fit weighs 200lb more than a 2020 Miata. Those are death traps and outliers, some might say. Consider that a 2020 F150 starts at 4,000lb while a 2000 F150 started at 4,000lb.
Cars don't weigh substantially more than they did 20 years ago. Specific models do tend to gain weight over time, but that's not relevant if comparing the cars themselves. A 2000 Honda Civic is an entirely different car than a 2020 Honda Civic. The 20 year old Civic is more similar to the Fit. The 2020 Fit weighs as much as the 2000 Civic, despite being larger, roomier, quieter, and safer. It's not that cars have gained weight in the last 20 years, simply that massive vehicles boasting extravagantly obvious externalized safety problems are grossly irresponsible and popular.
What hasn't changed is a regulatory neglect of vehicle safety to non-participants. When a lifted Dodge Ram decapitates everyone in a Honda Fit, the statistical penalty is scored against the Fit. We don't measure safety like this in other regulatory domains. NHTSA used to provide crash injury and fatality data separated by occupants and non-occupants. I haven't seen that detail provided since 2008, but I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong: https://cdan.dot.gov/query
Yeah, that was my first thought on seeing the picture - does it have a crumple zone? Since the door is in the front and you're expected to climb out through the sunroof in case of a crash, I imagine it's not the sort of thing you want to ride anywhere you wouldn't ride a bicycle.
That said, city streets that only had dense electric vehicles that don't go past 20 mph (maybe a mix of things like this and buses/streetcars) would be delightful.
I wonder how much of vehicle usage is "I want to carry big things around that don't fit on an electric bicycle" and how much is "I want to get somewhere fast".
Over the past couple of decades there have been recreations of various small cars from the 50s, 60s and 70s. Like the Mini, the Fiat 500, Volkswagen Beetle. Sadly these recreations do little more than borrow an aesthetic. They're often relatively big, heavy and, sadly, expensive.
In particular the Fiat 500 was a historically important car. It gave families of very modest means mobility. The modern Fiat 500 is nothing of the sort. It is a design icon built for the somewhat affluent. It isn't small. It isn't cheap. It isn't simple.
A friend of mine has a mechanical workshop. His shop is where all the weird cars get fixed. Alfa Romeos, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, old Fiat 500s and 600s. There's even a DeLorean that is there from time to time. It is hard to overstate just how small the original Fiat 500 is. Or even old Bertone-designed Alfa Romeos from the early 1970s.
Don't get me wrong, I like the modern Fiat 500 enough to own one. In fact, I own an electrical Fiat 500 that was imported from California (since, at the time, the electric Fiat 500 was sold only in California and Oregon). It is a really half assed car - built to allow FCA to sell cars at all in these states. Small battery, no supercharger, and the traction control is so useless that when I drive it (without my disapproving wife onboard) it spins the inner wheel madly through corners. The TC on/off switch only controls the light inside the switch itself. I can't imagine it is actually connected to anything but the battery.
It is a lot of fun, but it isn't in the spirit of the original.
What is needed is for car manufacturers and society to rediscover the purpose of small, light cars. Mobility without the resource drain. The joys of simplicity. You don't need power steering, electrical windows, electrical seats, a thousand dashboard controls.
We also don't want all this closed crap in our cars. In the golden age of cheap mobility, cars were more open ended (because they were simple). There were more aftermarket additions and mods. You could get parts for all common cars everywhere. It was uncomplicated. You could get your car repaired.
My ideal car for the future is little more than a carbon fiber tub with the minimum of bits attached to make it a car. A standardised, cheaply manufactured carbon monocoque around which you can have a cottage industry of bits for customization and extension. A car built to be worked on that is light, strong, cheap, and takes advantage of modern materials, tools and insights.
> What is needed is for car manufacturers and society to rediscover the purpose of small, light cars. Mobility without the resource drain.
I have some sympathy for this, but not for the accident death toll associated with vehicles that lack crumple zones, collapsible steering columns, head restraints, seat belts, and other stuff we take for granted ... all of which contributes weight and complexity.
It might be possible to revive this purpose if improvements in anti-collision software/hardware makes it cheap and light enough to fit to small vehicles: avoiding an accident is always preferable to having to survive one. But we're not there yet.
If urban streets and street regulations were be modified to keep speeds under 30 km/h at all times and remove most of the SUV-type vehicles, small cars with less safety gear could be practical and safe for urban driving.
Unfortunately the size/speed arms race in cars has left streets extremely dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone who isn’t driving something weighing 1500+ kg.
Perhaps if vehicle manufacturers/vendors were made partially liable for anyone injured in collisions involving their vehicles it would provide some pressure in the right direction.
I have little sympathy for the death toll routinely inflicted by distracted drivers of two-ton rolling fortresses upon those who leave the house without donning a tank. All those crumple zones are only helping the occupants. It's a form of violence once you start taking risk compensation into account. Personally I wouldn't mind it at all if drivers were a little more on the hook for the dangers they create.
(and why did you think a rightsized car would forego seatbelts and had restraints?)
Who said a modern day utilitarian small car shouldn't have modern safety features?
If you look at the "supermini" class cars in NCAP, there are several 5 star cars. Sure they are heavy (~1000-1300kg), but they also represent great potential for improvement if one were to re-think this category.
Right now the technologies that make sports cars and race cars lighter and stronger are expensive. Because composites are hard to manufacture cheaply. What if we were to invest in lowering the cost of cars made from composites? By improving process, by developing new design strategies and by focus on volume?
(As for "impossible": a decade ago, most current Tesla owners wouldn't have dreamt of there being a desirable electrical car. Much less one they themselves would own)
I don't think three wheeled cars are a good idea. They have poor handling and the mid-mounted wheel robs the car of floor pan space.
I would rather have a modern take on the original Fiat 500 brief. An affordable, super light car that can seat two adults side by side and two kids, has 4 wheels, few parts with excellent aftermarket access. Keep in mind that the 500 was a strictly _functional_ car in its time. Its design expression was very, very minimal. It was built for utility.
The original Fiat 500 was ~500kg. A car with an electrical motor would of course have added weight for batteries, but with the use of more modern materials than steel for the load bearing structures you should be able to hit the 750kg mark. It should be possible to make it even lighter than that.
As for design, I'd rather go for something that is "toned down and contemporary". Something that doesn't make too much of a statement so it can age well. In terms of design the Mynobe is kitsch.
Quite nice. What I really want is an electric kei roadster, though. With luck we'll get them to coincide with the end of the ‘crease all the things’ fashion trend.
The extreme waste of energy, space and other resources when we use a vehicle weighting 1.5 metric tons with space for five people plus luggage and often with off road capacity to transport one person a few kilometres along a good road.
An isetta would never pass current safety tests. Crash tests have to be passed with a certain investment in weight, and nothing smaller than maybe a smart or twizy can anymore.
If all cars in a city were limited to say 30-40kph and to a certain maximum weight it might be possible to limit the maximum kinetic energy in an accident and thus require less safety margins. You are not going to be able to take it out of the "safe zone" though.
The solution, except the more obvious ones bicycles and public transport, is that people that absolutely need a car for their daily commute don’t have more car than they need for that. Then when they need to haul something or go on a fishing trip twice a year they rent cars for that.
You would make narrower lanes if most cars looked like this. Not to talk about all the parking space you would save now already.
Why should I need to both own a car and rent a car? I'm not made out of money and I suspect I'm not at the bottom of the income pool. And I'm not going to get any kickback for the time that my car is sitting out there, not being driven.
This isn't even a matter of "going on a fishing trip twice a year". A bubble car is not enough of a car to go to IKEA or even an electronics retailer.
Because the car you’d own could be substantially cheaper than the car you currently own, making up for the entire difference for when you go to ikea or for an extended road trip. Delivery from ikea is entirely an option, too.
It’s fairly common that people massively underestimate the actual costs of owning a car (let alone the externalized costs such as free parking and environmental effects), but several studies lately consistently put the costs at around 500EUR/month in europe. Here’s a little example: VW Golf, mid market model, 30k EUR new, monthly total costs ~600 EUR. https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/autodatenbank/autokosten/det...
I can rent a larger car for two weeks every month for that amount money.
That’s a monthly difference of 230 EUR. That’s enough to rent the Golf for a full week every month. (I only did a cursory check at a single company, no discount etc: 233EUR/week)
Prices in the US may differ, but I doubt that the total economics play out substantially different, because that would imply that the market for rental cars would have serious potential for lowering prices.
Now think about the potential price difference if you could buy a vehicle that doesn’t need to go faster than 80km/h and was optimized for urban traffic.
Xylakant covered most of it. But just to add: when you want to haul furniture you rent a proper truck, and when you want to go on a fishing trip with your buddies you rent a nice 4 wheel SUV, and when you want to go on a cross country road trip you rent a nice sedan or even a cabriolet if that is what you want, instead of every day driving to work in a too big and expensive car that kind of works ok for all of the above.
Let's say that I need to go get a shelf from IKEA next weekend. Renting out the absolutely cheapest car (from Hertz) is 95 euro for a day. A larger one is 107 euro a day. If I wanted to for example get an automatic, that'd be 240 euro a day. 240 euros is already three months worth of insurance. And that's just for having a Ford Focus for 24 hours. And I need to drive to the airport and back in order to have the damn thing, so that's 50 minutes of driving on top of it. Hopefully they don't charge me to park there as well.
And for what purpose? So that I don't have the burden of owning a non-miniature car? I cannot fathom what the point in this exercise is. It's not like the miniature car has some immense superior qualities to it. By contrary, it seems to have an awful a lot of negatives.
How often do you really do that? Be honest, but very few people go to ikea and buy a single shelf every week. And for anything more than a shelf or two you’ll likely need a larger car anyways.
Why don’t you go to ikea, shop and drop it off with the folks offering transportation? They’ll take 40 or so and deliver a full minivan load for that. Or take a cab? There’s also car sharing options that offer minivans in many places for as low as 5EUR/hour.
The site hasn't been active in years, but if you've got $240k burning a hole in your pocket and need a quirky kit car, can't hurt to see if anyone's home.
I vaguely remember a BMW marketing ad - I think these were used to smuggle dissidents from East Berlin to West, at great personal risk to the owner of the vehicles...
