What comes to your mind when someone says “The World’s ‘smallest’ car?”
I’m sure many of you may have different ideas when you hear the word ‘smallest car’ and some of you may have seen the above scene from Family Guy but still.
In fact, there exists a car that is officially adjudged as the world’s smallest car –the Peel P50 – manufactured by the British (Manx, from the Isle of Man) Peel Engineering Company that was famous for its fibreglass boats in the 1950s through the 1970s when it folded.
Image: Andrew Bone via Flickr/Wikimedia Commons
The Peel P50 was recognised in 2010 by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest production car ever made.
Interestingly, the British also made the Welbike, a portable, foldable single-seat motorcycle manufactured by the Excelsior Motor Company of Birmingham under the management of Station IX during World War II. The bike was designed to be folded into the standard CLE Cannister to be airdropped and then be used.
Anyway, coming back to the topic of small cars.
The P50, on record remains the smallest car. Now, for those of us who grew up in the early 2000s, we might have seen this on the third episode of the tenth series of Top Gear, hosted by Jeremy Clarkson. Clearly, for Clarkson, the P50 was too big, as evinced by the pilot episode of the nineteenth series, a mere six years later, when he built the P45, an even smaller car, which, from the looks of it was essentially looked like he was wearing an oversized raincoat while driving on a cart through London.
The P45, built by Clarkson, and called the ‘birth of the future’, was compliant with most of the United Kingdom’s regulations relating to motor vehicles. Based on a quadricycle, it featured a 100-cc, two-stroke engine with a 1.7 litre petrol tank, which could be swapped out for a battery-powered motor, thus making it a hybrid, albeit restricting it to a speed of 3 miles/hour with the battery lasting just the hour. It also featured a reverse gear, something the P50 didn’t have.
Clarkson began by driving the P45 (the base model as he called it, with a “premium” feature being a hand-held wiper to clean the alleged windshield) on local roads before getting onto main roads and eventually the A3 road to reach London where he got so scared that he took the car with him on a bus for the rest of the journey. In London, he drove it into a mall, did some shopping, where he ran it on electric mode and then headed to the British Library to check how quiet the electric mode was, before running out of battery. He also drove it to the theatre to watch a show.
Clarkson also pitched the P45 to the investors of Dragon’s Den (what Shark Tank was known as before) where it ostensibly got rejected for being, well “impractical”.
You can watch Jeremy Clarkson’s adventures with the P45 on YouTube too:
Interestingly, Clarkson also has a show on Amazon Prime UK titled Clarkson’s Farm, which is a farming documentary.
What is the smallest car in India?
At the surface level, there are many answers to this question. Older people might answer Maruti 800, some may say Tata Nano or its electric variant, the Jayem Neo. Some might recall Chetan Maini’s Reva or its successor, the Mahindra E2O. A more recent answer is the MG Comet. Some may include quadricycles such as the Bajaj Qute or the Mahindra Atom.
The real answer here is something totally different. Built by Indore-based Wings EV, the Wings Robin is billed as India’s first microcar and is the same length as an average motorbike. It’s a two seater, with one seat behind the other, much like a two-seater aircraft, although the manufacturer claims it can support 2.5 people.
Here’s what the Robin looks like.
(Fun fact: This test run was done at Adarsh Palm Retreat in Bangalore. I saw a test run there last month, but by the time I pulled out my phone, the car had sped away)
There are other names floating around too, if you know any, drop a message in the comments below.
