When Small Cars were the Big Thing

In Munich, the Deutsche Museum’s Transport Center (Verkehrszentrum) features vehicles of all sorts and sizes, from giant locomotives, trams and trucks to bicycles, skateboards and baby carriages—an amazing collection.

But looking back at photos from my visit, I realized that within all that, the museum had a very interesting story to tell: how Europe became ‘motorized’ in the years after World War II, largely through the spread of small relatively cheap vehicles to families that hadn’t previously owned cars.

The small car wasn’t exclusively a post-war phenomenon, and many of them had roots in work done before the war, like the 1949 VW above, but it became a driver of physical and social mobility, and numbers of models sold in the millions where before the war even the most popular sold a few thousands.

The DKW F1 roadster from 1931, built by Audi and originally powered by a  DKW  motorcycle engine, was the first successful front-wheel-drive car.

In some cases, they came from traditional car makers; in a few, like the bug-eyed three-wheel wonder from Messerschmitt, they came from companies barred from their previous fields. This ‘kabinenroller’ or cabin scooter sold 200,000 in the early 1950s. Windshield wiper was hand-operated, reverse gear was an extra-cost option, and drivers had to be careful not to roll over.

Messerschmitt wasn’t the only maker to try out the cabin scooter; this one, by Heinkel, upped the ante with a fourth wheel, though without much space between the two rear wheels. It had a number of technical enhancements, but  its production cost was so high it only lasted two years. It was partly based on Italy’s Isetta design.

A better-known and more successful adaptation of the Isetta came from BMW. Best-known to Americans as Urkel’s car from ‘Family Matters,’ it was a success  for BMW, so popular that its first years of production in the mid 50s it had a waiting list at dealers. It also spawned macabre jokes about what would happen in a head-on collision.

Of course, the demand for small cars and the supply of them wasn’t limited to Germany; France and Italy in particular had important models and growing markets as well. Two French models were important contributors, although one is remembered far more than the other. This is the lesser-known: the Renault R4, built simple and cheap, and with one of the first hatchback designs.

The better-known French competitor is, of course, the 2CV, the ‘ugly duck’ to VW’s ‘beetle.’ Introduced in the 50s based on a pre-war design, it sold in the millions for decades. The museum’s exhibit is a ‘box duck,’ a small truck version, aimed at tradesmen and farmers.

Italy’s biggest contributor is also a 1930s design, the original Fiat 500, called ‘Topolino’ or the ‘Little Mouse.’ It was another multi-million seller and its name lives on with a current model as well. In 1956, Fiat adopted the Fiat 600, Topolino’s successor, as the Multipla van, one first true vans, along with VW’s Type 2, or Microbus. The Type 2, from 1950 on, was built on a stretched Beetle chassis.

Many of the German entries in the small car derby did reasonably well, but  never matched the volume or longevity of VW’s line.  Among them were some fairly sleek offerings, like this NSU TT from 1972, the last in a million-selling line that ran for almost 15 years. Then the company bet its life on the Wankel rotary engine, and nearly went bankrupt.

The Lloyd LP 400, a mid-50s model, sold in hundreds of thousands, at least in part because it had a shorter wait time to get one than the Beetle. Its roof was covered in artificial leather; its predecessor, the  LP 300, had most of the body covered that way, and a timber and plywood frame. Unlike the 300, the 400 had a trunk lid. In the 300, suitcases went behind the rear seat from the inside!

More successful was the Goggomobil, which sold almost 300,000 cars between 1954 and 1964 when the failing company was taken over by BMW. By the mid-60s, the subcompact car era in Europe was headed toward its end, ironically only a few years before American cars, which had continued to expand, began their ‘resizing.’

But then, there’s the subcompact that kept on going until not its company, but its country went out of business: East Germany’s ubiquitous Trabant, whose 2-cycle engine ran on an oil/gas mixture fed to the engine by gravity and which was, because of a steel shortage, the first mass production car with a fiberglass body skin. Between 1957 and 1990, over three million of them hit the road.

Nowhere near as successful—only about 1600 were built—but very much more stylish was this  1957 Victoria 250, called ‘Spatz,’ or ‘Sparrow.’ Like the Trabant, it had a two-cycle engine, but also a push-button array to change gears. The museum’s exhibit was driven by its original owner for forty years.

Stepping forward to the present, tiny cars are not completely over. There is the Smart car, which can occasionally be seen parked perpendicular to the curb where larger cars park parallel, and a number of experimental vehicles, not available to the public,  from  companies experimenting with self-driving cars.

Taking a step back to before the war, the museum has a few more interesting items, including what was intended as a budget Bugatti, if you can imagine that. The 1928 Type 40 coupe had a 4-cylinder engine, sporty-looking coachwork,  the iconic Bugatti horseshoe radiator. It might have fared better for the company if not for the Depression beginning the next year.

If Bugattis are unique, here’s a small gallery of imitators. The Dixi, below, was  a BMW attempt in the late 20s to produce small inexpensive cars in volume. BMW jump-started the process by modeling it on Britain’s Austin 7. About 16,000 Dixis were sold in five years.

An even more blatant imitation was the 1924 Opel ‘Laubfrosch’ or ‘Tree Frog,’ which was available only in green. It was a direct copy of the Citroen 5, which was available only in yellow; it gave rise to the German expression that translates to ‘The same, in green.’ Citroen sued and lost in German courts. The Laubfrosch was also the first German car built by mass production on an assembly line; 120,000 were sold.

Green certainly seems to be the theme in this section! In this case, meet the Steyr ‘Baby,’ introduced in Austria in 1934 by a company with many interests, including larger cars. Handsome as it is, its price kept it from becoming a true ‘people’s car.’ It’s also one of the many cars developed in that era that show first attempts at true streamlining. The similarly-shaped VW Beetle was another, as were the ‘Airflow’ cars built by Chrysler in the mid 1930s.

The Goliath Pionier, our last sample, made no pretense to sleek, aerodynamic, stylish or, frankly, anything but cheap. Developed in 1924, it was a two-seater with a one-cylinder engine and three wheels. An ’emergency seat’ to hold an extra passenger was an option.  It  was so lightweight that it  was exempt from taxes and didn’t require a license to drive. Even as ‘the cheapest  sedan in the world,’ it only sold 4,000 in the early 1930s.