I suppose it goes without saying that a shootout between a BMW Isetta 300 and a Messerscmitt KR200 isn’t your average sort of road test. How could it be? Choosing criteria and finding some frame of reference for two such unusual machines is easy enough in the abstract, almost impossible when one is actually confronted with them. Think of these cars in the way Citroen’s Pierre Boulanger envisioned the 2CV before its birth—“four wheels and an umbrella”—and you just may have a starting point.
Odd cars require odd means of description, particularly when they deliver unique answers to the question of what constitutes suitable transportation. Rather than rush to the thesaurus seeking synonyms for “tiny” (various examples will appear here, even so), the first thought was to find literary references to both the Isetta and the Messerschmitt.
This was, perhaps, a less successful venture than anticipated.
The Isetta appeared, albeit briefly, in one of the autobiographical works by the legendary Stirling Moss. In 1961’s A Turn at the Wheel, Moss wrote, “I see from my diary that I had plenty of fun as well…on February 19th [1957] I have an entry that reads: I turned over an Isetta today with the demonstrator [salesman] on board! …I came into a corner, the road was quite clear, and I started to lift off the throttle…the demonstrator said: ‘Oh, no, sir, you can take it at this speed; there’s no trouble at all, no trouble at all.’
“So I kept my foot down and we went round, and it just did not take it. The thing flipped over on its side and skated along to a standstill, having flattened the headlight into a D-shape and broken the side window…I opened the roof, got out through it, pushed the thing upright…opened the front door, got in and drove off…the demonstrator was staggered—I am afraid his opinion of my driving must have gone down.”
It wasn’t exactly the kind of ringing endorsement BMW would have chosen to excerpt for an ad. But whether it had anything to do with Moss’s later acquisition of a Heinkel—one of the many Isetta-imitators that sprang up during the micro-car craze of the 1950s—is unclear.
The Messerschmitt fared rather better in print, playing a small but key role in the iconic 1958 British novel I’m All Right, Jack. It was cast as the mount of choice for the hero, one Stanley Windrush, a hapless college graduate chucked out of the Foreign Office in London who took employment as an Ordinary Worker at a firm called Missiles Ltd.
Emboldened by a healthy paycheck and the prospect of marrying Cynthia Kite, the communist (“It’s better in the Soviet Union”) shop steward’s daughter, young Stan took the automotive-ownership plunge. Of his new Messerschmitt, Windrush tells a co-worker: “I’m beating the rail strike…It does about a million miles a gallon and I can park it under a shelf in my aunts’ shed. These people used to make fighter aircraft for Hitler and as they had a few of these lids left over they make these instead. At least I think that’s what the man said.”
Poor Stan was confused about the Messerschmitt’s real gestation, as he was later proven wrong, alas, about Cynthia’s feelings for him and his new car. Likewise, one would be mistaken to assume that the Isetta was created in typically Italian comic-opera style when its first parent, an Italian firm called Iso, had managed to wildly overproduce doors for its well-known refrigerator before turning the surplus into transportation devices.