I've often thought that microcars were styled by the same guy who designed the vehicles in 'Who framed Roger Rabbit?', but I overtook a new Microcar M.Go this morning and it looked pretty good...



... I just wonder who buys these things given how much they cost?

 

French idiots, mostly. But they also used to wear silly little round glasses & too-short trousers.

I think teenagers could drive them without pre-licence, which seemed more like true Gallic logic.

Why on earth you'd buy a shed with a mini-excavator engine (unless the totalitarian bully-boys bribed one with one's owm money) when one could buy a perfectly decent second-hand proper car, is utterly beyond me.

Buying a shed with an engine made sense in post-war Europe (Lloykoplastbomber, anyone?) before there were decent secondhand cars, and before Dante Giacosa made tiny, mass-produced decent cars a reality, but today?

Reliant tried to sell them over here. Which only proved there are very few people at the extremely stupid end of the bell curve. Mostly those at Reliant who failed to capitalise on the Scimitar series & tried to sell back-to-front 3-wheelers instead.

 

So, you do or don't like them, Nick? I can't quite tell where you stand on this subject...........

 

The Lloyd, oh my God, the Lloyd. Completely forgot about that pos!

 

Well they do exist with diesel engines too... so if you're in for a sporty diesel..

 

Bizarrely enough, they evolved directly into a decent little car and then indirectly into today's Subaru.

It seems hard to imagine how dreadful the first L300s were, though. I mean, an Austin A30 was like a 1er by comparison. Actually, an 1er looks like an Austin A30 to me...

Anyway, any modern bubble car is gonna be a hard sell, even if they are actually very good. The Grinnall Scorpion is far closer to my ideal. There was even an incredibly expensive German one using Smart components; sort of cross between a luxury Messerschmitt Kabinenroller & a Smart, whick looked superbly-made.

LJKS once designed a modern KR using a Honda Leadwing powertrain, which was a very good idea indeed.

But in reality, such specialist vehicles will be very expensive, if they are to be properly-engineered.

As Ratan Tata has found out, even the poorest on earth don't want a two-cylinder scooter-based shed. The Nano's sales are rather disppointing.

I'm rather hoping Gordon Murray can bring the Heinkel Trojan concept properly up-to-date.

 

Seemingly not much happening with the T.25 or T.27 becoming a car you can actually buy anytime soon... I wonder if it's doomed to be another Tucker Torpedo?

 

The Big Three Killed my Baby...it's hard to make money on an advanced design and the industry doesn't like change.

I think until the depression really kicks in, people still want to lease Audi QSs and RR Efooks and other bigging-up props & driving round in a Novellini steam cubicle is regarded as generally not cool.

It's that old cognitive dissonance between people wanting a machomobile themselves & wanting everyone else to shave the planet from an imagined ecological disaster.

 

LOL

Novellini - what an utterly shit brand name for a supposed 'premium' product!!

I could imagine the brand name on a vac'-formed 'Kiss Me Quick' hat on sale at Blackpool Pleasure Beach though...

 

I suppose the guy cannot help his surname. Didn't stop Smith selling his supposedly premium cars...

Innocenti is hardly macho, either. And Gaggia is far too onomatopaeic.

They did invent the Welleyes cycle brand, because the name sounded terribly English. To Italians.