Little wonders.

In 1895 Léon Bollée built a tandem three-wheeler and registered a word for it, voiturette, a little car. The Léon Bollée Voiturette sold well, and the word outlived it, becoming the French name for any small car after it. Ettore Bugatti’s Peugeot Bébé, shown at the Paris Salon in 1912, put an 855 cc four in a car of under 350 kg.

From 1910 came the cyclecar, a light car built from motorcycle parts. The Bédélia of 1910 was steered from the back seat; the GN cyclecar began in a coach-house near Hendon. H. F. S. Morgan’s Morgan Three-Wheeler, taxed as a motorcycle, set the cyclecar hour record at Brooklands in November 1912, and at Amiens in 1913 it was first home in the first Cyclecar Grand Prix, though the cyclecar class went to a Bédélia. More than 50 American cyclecar firms were announced in 1913–⁠14; by 1915 nearly all had been undercut by cheap proper cars, Ford’s Model T first among them.

• 14 cars
• 4 maker groups
• 3 essential
• Shortest: Briggs & Stratton Flyer, 2.34 m

Peace brought more cyclecars, and in 1920 France gave them a tax class: 100 francs a year for two seats, 1,100 cc and no more than 350 kg, a limit the Amilcar CC met only without a dynamo, a battery or a starter. In Berlin Rudolf Slaby built the Slaby-Beringer, a one-seat electric car whose wooden body was its own chassis. Then the Citroën 5HP, shown in 1921, and the Austin Seven, announced in 1922, offered a complete small car for the price of a cyclecar, and together they finished the boom.

The Seven was built under licence as the BMW 3/15, BMW’s first car, as the Rosengart LR2 in France and as the American Austin in Pennsylvania. Laws shaped the rest. A light German three-wheeler paid no vehicle tax and needed no licence, which gave Carl Borgward his first car, the Goliath Pionier; a Japanese rule of 1930 that freed cars of up to 500 cc from the driving licence gave Japan the first Datsun, the Datsun Type 11, the root of Nissan. And in 1936 the Fiat 500 Topolino, the smallest mass-produced car of its day, was Italy’s first true people’s car.

• 27 cars
• 2 maker groups
• 3 essential
• Shortest: Slaby-Beringer, 2.30 m

With petrol all but denied to French civilians under the Occupation, Peugeot built an electric two-seater, the Peugeot VLV; Vichy banned it in 1942, yet 377 were built by 1945. After the war Britain’s state, which had issued disabled drivers free single-seat invalid carriages since the First World War, took them from new makers, among them Invacar. In Rosenheim Fritz Fend, a young aircraft engineer, designed the Fend Flitzer: a one-seat tricycle for the war-disabled that able-bodied buyers wanted too; it grew into the Messerschmitt.

Britain’s light three-wheelers paid motorcycle tax. The Bond Minicar of 1949 had no doors and no reverse; the Reliant Regal of 1952, a four-seater, was built to weigh under 406 kg (8 cwt) to qualify. America bought the King Midget as a $270 kit from the back pages of Popular Science. Japan created its kei class of light cars in July 1949, and in 1952 the Auto Sandal was the first kei car with four wheels to go on sale.

• 32 cars
• 9 maker groups
• 3 essential
• Shortest: Fend Flitzer, 2.00 m

In West Germany a motorcycle licence of the old class 4 also covered a small car of up to 250 cc, and the bubble car filled that space. The Iso Isetta of 1953 opened at the front; BMW rebuilt it round its own motorcycle engine and built 161,728 of the BMW Isetta. Fend’s tandem two-seater went into an idle Regensburg works of Messerschmitt, the aircraft maker, as the Messerschmitt KR175, and its successor, the Messerschmitt KR200, had no reverse gear. In 1957 the four-seat Goggomobil outproduced the Isetta, and it reached 284,491 by 1969.

When Suez brought petrol rationing to Britain, Heinkels came from Hanover to Croydon by Dakota, five a day; later Croydon built the Heinkel itself, as the Trojan 200, and the Isle of Man built the Peel P50, 1,372 mm long, which Guinness lists as the smallest production car. In 1957 the Fiat Nuova 500 set the length of the red notch, and in 1958 Japan’s kei box took four adults in the Subaru 360. West German buyers were already moving up to bigger small cars; in Britain the Mini of 1959 finished the job, and BMW built its last Isetta in 1962.

• 65 cars
• 3 maker groups
• 9 essential
• Shortest: Peel P50, 1.37 m

Japan’s 360 cc kei box held until 1975, and inside it the makers raced. The Honda N360 of 1967 got 31 PS from a motorcycle twin and set off the horsepower war; the Daihatsu Fellow Max SS of 1970 took it to 40 PS. The box grew to 550 cc in 1976, and in 1979 the Suzuki Alto, a bare van at ¥470,000 that dodged a tax, pulled the class out of its slump.

Britain kept its tax-friendly three-wheelers, from Tom Karen’s tangerine Bond Bug of 1970 to the Reliant Robin of 1973. In France the 50 cc licence-free car, legally an enclosed moped, took off: after the Arola of 1976 about 30 firms took up the idea, by one museum’s count, and the largest, Acoma, maker of the Acoma Mini Comtesse, sold 3,500 cars in 1979. The oil crisis also put electric cars into small series: the CitiCar in Florida and the Zagato Zele in Milan.

• 44 cars
• 2 maker groups
• 3 essential
• Shortest: Minicat, 1.58 m

In 1980 industry took over the voiturette. Ligier, the Formula One constructor, built the Ligier JS4 round a cab it made for Renault and sold about 7,000 in 1981; the boat-builder Jeanneau launched the Microcar RJ49. Aixam, reborn in 1983 from the bankrupt Arola, has led the trade since 1987 by its own count, and since 1992 the licence-free car has had a European class of its own, the light quadricycle.

The Sinclair C5, an electric tricycle launched in the snow in January 1985 at £399, was stopped within eight months; Denmark’s CityEl, whose whole glazed top tips forward, lasted about 30 years. Japan’s 660 cc kei rules brought three two-seat sports cars in 1991–⁠92, the ABC kei sports cars, and in October 1998 the Smart Fortwo went on sale: a city car 2.5 m long, the Swatch founder’s idea, built by Mercedes.

• 20 cars
• 6 maker groups
• 1 essential
• Shortest: Sinclair C5, 1.74 m

London took to the REVA G-Wiz, India’s first production electric car, as a way round the congestion charge, until a crash test in 2007 made it notorious. The big makers built small: the Toyota iQ of 2008 took three adults and a child in under 3 m (9 ft 10 in), Ratan Tata’s one-lakh Tata Nano was meant for families who rode on scooters, and the Renault Twizy, its passenger sitting behind the driver, was Europe’s best-selling plug-in of 2012.

Then the licence-free car went electric. The Citroën Ami of 2020, which a 14-year-old may drive in France, was sold in electrical shops; the Microlino, built in Turin from 2022, brought back the Isetta’s front door; and in China the four-seat Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, 28,800 yuan in 2020, became the country’s best-selling electric car, with more than 1.1 million sold by February 2023. The last Smart Fortwo was built in March 2024.

• 22 cars
• 2 maker groups
• 2 essential
• Shortest: Renault Twizy, 2.32 m