…Or I could have gone with something more iconic a la 1950’s like this ‘57 Chevy.
How about this Plymouth Roadrunner?
Nah, we need something with a bit more tang to it… Could it be this Edsel?
Uh, no, that’s too sour. Just look at the puckered up grille on that Edsel. Not today.
Something tart but sweet with just the right amount of tang is what today’s fruit inspired car needs to be, and I've found just the thing. How about an itty bitty Key Lime?
Perfect! It’s a BMW Isetta 300 that I found perched on a lift at a repair shop situated in a small town in Iowa that specializes in small engine repair and Saturns. I blurred the plate, but those of you who are from good ol’ I-oh-way will probably recognize those solid blue plates from a decade or two ago before they were replaced with the slightly nicer looking ones that supposedly show a view of the Des Moines skyline with an extra building or two thrown in to make it seem a bit more metropolitan. Eh, what the heck, I’ll take phantom buildings over a license plate that features corn cobs any day.
BMW’s Isettas are perhaps the best known ones, but BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke -AKA Bavarian Motor Works) didn’t actually come up with the car. The Isetta was designed by an Italian design firm called Iso SpA that also built refrigerators and scooters. Iso took their design and licensed it to manufacturers throughout the world. BMW bought one of those licenses as well as the tooling to build it in 1954. The original Isetta featured a single cylinder 236 cubic centimeter (14.4 cu in.) motorcycle engine that could make the car go from zero to sixty in roughly the time it would take to have just walked whatever distance ended up being covered. Well, that’s not totally true.. 0-30 took over 30 seconds, and the Isetta did 0-60 in NEVER. That’s right. The top speed of an original Isetta was 47 MPH, so unless you’re gonna’ get out and push really hard, that 60 MPH just isn’t going to happen.
The Isetta is considered a “microcar” -shocking, isn’t it? No? Well of course not! It’s probably the most recognizable micro, but it has company both from back in its day and in modern times. If you saw that Addams Family movie about a decade or two ago, then you may have noticed Cousin Itt driving a Messerschmitt KR175. There are also the old Fiat 500s (the new ones come dang close and may actually fit the criteria too), and the Goggomobil, as well as the modern Smart Fortwo, and the smallest of all (as production microcars go) the Peel P50. While I wouldn’t consider it to be in good company, per se, at least we can firmly state that the Isetta definitely has company.
I like to look at these itsy bitsy autos, but they’re not the type of thing I have any desire to own. If I had one, I’d want to drive it, and when you drive something small, there’s a good chance that something big (which, relatively speaking here, could be a Mini, a Goldwing motorcycle, or a hamster ball being piloted by an obese rodent) is going to come along and cream ya’. There really isn’t much that a driver or passenger of a microcar can do in the event of a major collision other than die or get extremely mangled. On the bright side, parking should be easy to find. You could squeeze in just about anywhere with a microcar.
BMW redid a lot of things on the Isetta. So much so that you can’t swap any parts from an Iso Isetta back and forth with a BMW Isetta. They just won’t fit. Among the many things BMW replaced was the engine. The result was 3 variations of the Isetta available to consumers: The 250, the 300, and the 600 (all rounded-up versions of the cubic centimeter displacement of the engines, which were actually 247cc, 298cc, and 582cc). The one we’re looking at is an Isetta 300. Its scurvy little single cylinder engine packs a measly 13 HP and 13.6 lb ft of torque for a top speed of 53 MPH. I’m not absolutely certain what year this one is, but they were only made until 1962. This one still wears its original paint, a color called “Reseda Green”.
Brand new back in the day, an Isetta would set you back roughly $1,100. For that sum, you got a car that measured 7’5” long, 4’5” wide, 4’4” tall, and weighed in at right around 800 lbs. sans passengers. It had a 3.4 gallon fuel tank and would get roughly 50 MPG. The only thing separating occupants from whatever might hit them head on, or whatever they might run into is the door (AKA the entire front plane of the car), which hinges open for entry/exit/extrication.
Clearly, today’s little limey squirt is a work in progress. Years of wear, tear, and neglect have turned it into a restoration project. At the moment, it doesn’t have much in the way of an interior going for it. What should be there, though, is a little bench seat that could fit two adults (maybe) and possibly a small child (safety and booster seats be damned!) if they all packed themselves together like sardines. I rip on it a bit, but Isettas are fun. That’s the real reason to have or keep one around: the quirkiness of the whole thing. They’re just such goofy little cars, you can’t help but admire them.
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