European car manufacturers are currently tripping over themselves to figure out how personal transport and "last mile" solutions will look in the years to come. The solutions are always electric, and they're also tiny. What most companies (bar Citroen, Renault, and Fiat) seem to have forgotten is that we've had an answer to this problem all along: the microcar.
The microcar is a singular little thing—its job is to frugally take one person (or maybe two people) where they need to go while taking up as little space as possible. A few have broken their way into the public consciousness—Top Gear made a global megastar of Peel's cars, BMW's Isetta remains a design icon, and the Messerschmitt KR200 is just plain cool—but where did these tiny wonders come from? And do they have a future?
Well, without the microcar's predecessors, we may not have the modern motorcar as we know it. Sort of.
Let's roll back to the genesis of the car: the Mercedes-Benz Patent Motorwagen. While not a microcar by any means (though it seats only two people and has a tiny engine and only three wheels), it got plenty of people thinking.
While Karl Benz was inventing the car and his wife was road-tripping it in 1885, a French inventor named Léon Bollée put his thinking cap on. He was 15 at the time, but it gave him time to be with his thoughts. At that age, he had a keen brain—one that invented a pedal boat of sorts. Bollée was smart, to say the least—he built calculators to help his father's business, one of which won an award at the 1889 Paris Exposition and went on to be patented all over the world.
In 1895, Bollée and his father created "La Novelle," a steam-powered trike, and in the same year, Bollée created a gasoline-powered… thing as well. A year later, Bollée founded Léon Bollée Automobiles to mass-produce his tiny cars, dubbing them "Voiturette"—a mashup of the French for automobile (voiture) and the suffix you throw on a word to make it small (ette). Small car, basically.