Gavin Green: time to rethink city cars
For quick personal city transport, it’s hard to beat a bicycle. Unless it’s wet or cold, and you don’t want to pedal and puff. Then, nothing beats a small car. So, the ideal form of urban transport would be a cross between a small car and bike. Such a machine exists. It’s called the quadricycle; in effect a four-wheel motorbike with a roof. The best-known quadricycle of recent years was that Bangalore-built botch-up, the G-Wiz. It was renowned for its pedal-car style, its lethargy and for being at the opposite end of the crash safety scale from a modern Volvo.
Yet, for a while, it was the UK’s and the world’s best-selling electric vehicle. So, it was providing emissions-free motoring – of sorts – years before Elon Musk had heard of Nikola Tesla. It also presaged two newer and rather better electric quadricycles, both from mainstream car manufacturers. With a bit of luck, more may be on their way.
First was the Renault Twizy, a cleverly engineered tandem two-seater. I’ve done many miles around London in Twizys and love them. Unless it rains or is cold, when the open flanks can be a problem. Then there’s the new Citroën Ami, already available in France and likely to come to the UK next year. It’s fun, like the Twizy, and weather-proof.
I wrote about in the March issue of CAR. It is restricted to 28mph but accelerates like a normal car from trac lights. It is small and light yet high enough not to be intimidated. It has two-abreast seating and elicits smiles from bystanders, not laughs. By some margin it is the handiest and most logical city car I’ve driven: small, a cinch to park, great visibility, zero tailpipe emissions, cheap to run.
Quadricycles must weigh less than 450kg (excluding batteries) and do not need to pass the same safety tests as normal cars. They’re certainly safer in a crash than anything on two wheels and are the spiritual successors to some wonderful petrol-powered microcars from yesteryear.
My favourite was the Messerschmitt Kabinenroller, a tandem two-seater from the ’50s built by the German aircraft maker. This superbly engineered little car featured an aircraft-style bubble canopy and a steel monocoque supporting a rear subframe that carried its two-stroke engine and rear suspension. At around 350kg it was light and very compact.
Another favourite was the BMW Isetta ‘bubble car’ of 1955, powered by a bike engine and the first car to achieve three litres per 100km (94mpg). It was the smallest city car BMW has ever built and, in many ways, the best.
You still occasionally see Messerschmitts and BMW Isettas in London, fighting for road space with SUVs weighing more than six times as much and occupying almost three times the road space, and you wonder: where’s the progress in ecient and eco-friendly urban transport? The cars we buy for town are plainly ill-suited for urban use. Quadricycles or microcars – in Japan they call them ‘kei cars’ – are surely at least part of the answer.
EVs per se are not the solution. Most are too big and too heavy. Most also carry a huge manufacturing CO2 footprint, due to the energy needed to make their batteries. The call for longer driving range invariably means bigger batteries, exacerbating the problem.
We’ve seen plenty of clever city-car proposals before, most memorably at a Frankfurt motor show 10 years ago. There were twin- and single-seat tandem electric city concepts from Volkswagen (the NILS), Opel (Rake) and Audi’s Urban Concept, delightfully styled with just a hint of ’30s Auto Union GP racer. All acknowledged that urban journeys typically involved only one or two people and that small size and manoeuvrability were paramount, as was clean electric power.
Instead, a decade on, the fastest growing form of urban transport appears to be a big SUV, typically with a single person onboard. More than ever, we don’t seem to know how to design cars for the very place where most are used: in urban areas.
Former CAR editor Gavin Green is a respected automotive commentator. He has the legs for the open road but is ideally suited to urban journeys