A Place that Celebrates the Smallest Cars

Comedian Steve Martin famously suggested we all get small, but that hasn’t been the case with car museums.  With a few notable exceptions, car museums typically lean heavily on ‘50s & ‘60s chrome, tail fins and muscle, or on race cars or customs built for Hollywood. A few heavyweights like the Petersen Automotive Museum in L.A. also have extensive collections of brobdingnagian pre-war ultra-Classics like Packards and Duesenbergs, but most if not all relegate oddities like microcars to a side room if not just a corner, where you may only see a Crosley Hotshot or a Mini Cooper allegedly owned by a Beatle. Most of the tiny cars are evolutionary dead ends, largely ignored by the museums as well as the visiting public, who want to see something flashy Frank Sinatra drove and not something that they find difficult to distinguish from their kid’s pedal car.

Former Dubble Bubble candy executive Bruce Weiner takes a different view, and he has spent his time and money collecting microcars, nearly all European, and lovingly restoring these automotive ugly ducklings. In 1997 he opened a Microcar Museum that bears his name in Madison, Georgia. There you will find the minicar presented unapologetically at center stage in the world's largest collection. One recent hot Saturday, my wife Julie, eight-year old son Sammy and I were returning from the mountains of North Carolina by a path that avoided the Interstate, at least for a time. In Athens our Saturn SUV began to exhibit a sticky brake caliper, and so I had only moments before diagnosed the problem on my smartphone when I spotted a microcar atop a Dubble Bubble sign on the roadside and demanded we pull over, crisis be damned. Julie quickly picked up on a tone in my voice that would brook no misgivings, so a minute or so later we found ourselves just inside the doors of Mr. Weiner’s expansive building.

Even the price is micro: the entry fee is $5 for adults, kids under 10 get in free. For your money, you get to see close to 200 cars in a space that would fit perhaps 75 full-size vehicles. As a bonus, there are period vending machines and kiddie rides throughout the display space, as well as a number of powered and pedal cars intended for children. All the cars on the display floor are in running condition, and while some are original and unrestored others have been lovingly restored to showroom new condition. A quick review of Bruce’s website, http://microcarmuseum.com shows that he is constantly revising the collection, with some vehicles sold or traded, and others newly acquired. In some cases he has acquired an entire collection at once, like the Automuseum Warstein-Belecke in Germany, which was open for only three years in the late ‘70s before its owner passed away. In late 2004, Bruce tracked down the widow and purchased all 21 vehicles, shipping them back home in several cargo containers. A number of less-presentable cars awaiting restoration are stacked up on racks to the side until they are ready for their close-ups.

Most of the cars in the collection are under 700cc of engine displacement (about half what a VW Beetle had) and some are as little as 50cc (which corresponds to a moped). Some are by names you know, such as BMW, FIAT, Honda, Subaru, Mini, Smart and Mazda, while others’ names are known mainly in another context, such as Messerschmitt, a former producer of fearsome fighter planes which post-war switched to producing a small, extremely aerodynamic three-wheeler that looked like it had been scrounged from leftover cockpit plexiglass. The Messerschmitt’s designer later created the FMR, a four-wheel microcar so good even auto enthusiasts loved it, although it ultimately did not remain in production. The remaining dozens of pure microcar producers are obscure, with even the most successful like Goggomobil, which produced more than a quarter million cars over nearly 15 years, now almost forgotten. Some of the manufacturers were themselves so small that there is even a car in the collection of completely unknown provenance. America is represented only by the King Midget, an Ohio-built make sold in kit form in the pages of magazines such as Popular Mechanics and which made a serviceable farm vehicle or golf cart.

There are poignant models, such as several early French Velocars, which were pedal powered and made of plywood, first pedaled frequently by blinded World War I veterans whose wives would steer, and later driven during the German occupation when natives were denied such “luxuries” as motor fuel. Another micro that tugs a bit at the heart strings is the 1985 Sinclair C5, a sleek, low-slung pedal-electric tricycle that was the brainchild of computer and digital watch developer Sir Clive Sinclair. Envisioned as an eco-friendly replacement for the car on most trips, it was a commercial disaster, selling only 17,000 units despite its brilliant design.

Other makes seem to be there for comic relief, like the Peel P50, a British model produced briefly in the 1960s that holds the Guinness record as the world’s smallest car You could fit one in the bed of a pickup truck with room left over for a couple of major appliances. The tiny box gained worldwide fame in a 2007 episode of England’s popular “Top Gear” automotive TV show when the ever-arch presenter Jeremy Clarkson shoehorned his big-boned frame into one, drove it into the elevator of a high-rise office building and proceeded to tour the BBC’s executive suite, a feat that can still be witnessed on YouTube. The sportier Peel Trident is also represented. There is also a “cafe racer” size motorcycle and an off-road example of the Segway transporter. A wildly customized dragster version of a BMW Isetta that owns the distinction of having been reproduced as a Hot Wheels has been relegated to a corner for being not quite in keeping with the museum's focus.

The microcar was born of postwar privation, with fuel and raw materials in short supply throughout the continent. But hard times thankfully didn’t last. That meant that for all of the postwar era’s manufacturers, trying to compete in the microcar space was ultimately quixotic, with a brief flowering in the mid-to-late ‘50s as Europe rebuilt its prosperity, followed by failure or adaptation to larger models as finances, emissions control and changing consumer tastes dictated the bubble car’s demise. One major factor working against them was the rise in popularity of motorcycles and motor scooters at the low end. Meanwhile just a notch above they were confronted by the genius of Alec Issigonis, a young Turkish-born engineer of Greek descent who was at hand when Leonard Lord, head of the Austin Motor Company famously said: “God damn these bloody awful bubble cars. We must drive them out of the streets by designing a proper miniature car.” That effort became the 1959 Mini, which for the first time turned the engine and transmission sideways in a front-wheel drive car. The new layout allowed for a mini-car’s interior capacity to be provided in not much more space than a microcar took up. The innovation earned Mr. Issigonis a knighthood and has reverberated through the world’s production cars to the present day.

The success of the Mini was undeniable, but it took Volkswagen’s shocking adoption of the Issigonis layout in the 1974 Golf, the Beetle’s estimable successor to galvanize the rest of the world’s manufacturers into adopting it for nearly all their workaday models. Longitudinal engines with rear or all-wheel drive survived only in luxury vehicles and sports cars, while mid-engine configurations were entirely devoted to sports cars and rear-engine designs lived on in only the tiniest cars and in Porsches.  Although they are considered microcars, the two rear-engined Smarts in the collection dwarf most of the other vehicles. And unlike the older microcars, the Smarts are surprisingly crashworthy.

Although with the exception of the Smart the microcar seemed at a dead end in Europe (with most European small cars having engine sizes of one liter or more), in Japan 600cc "kei cars" have retained popularity, and that makes it a bit disappointing that no modern examples (not even Mitsubishi’s U.S.-spec electric i-MiEV) are represented in Bruce’s collection, nor is there an early-’70s Honda Z600, an electric Corbin Sparrow from California, or a new Tata Nano, an Indian kei-like model that met its target of initially selling for $2,000. But these are minor quibbles, as is the absence of Crosley and American Bantam and the relegation of several examples of VW’s Beetle to space off the main floor, apparently because they are too large. Sammy wandered over there and was confronted by three toy terriers, one of which saw him playfully punch my arm in a game of “slug bug” and never forgave him, following him around barking angrily during the rest of his visit. The dogs’ owner was none other than Bruce Weiner, whose hand I shook as I congratulated him on his collection.  

Although the microcar idea remained dormant for a while in Europe, times change again. A new material called graphene promises that small cars will one day have the same crashworthiness as big cars. You could stretch a piece of it as thin as saran wrap like a drumhead, poke it with a pencil, then you would need to stand an elephant on the pencil in order to get the pencil through. Recently Volkswagen announced that for the 2014 model year it would produce the XL1, a 235 mpg two seater so narrow that the seating is staggered so that driver and passenger do not sit shoulder-to-shoulder and so aerodynamic that the side view mirrors have been replaced by view screens. The design leans heavily on carbon fiber construction and an unconventionally narrow rear track quite similar to the old FMR microcar. It’s powered by an 800cc turbodiesel producing only 47 horsepower as well as an electric motor. Citroen has also shown a sleek model that gets over 166 mpg, virtually all supercars are moving toward carbon fiber and Ford recently inked a deal with Dow Chemical to provide carbon-fiber for car bodies, with a goal for reducing weight by 750 pounds. So while future car sizes may not quite be micro, their weights will be. Not such a dead end after all.