Start Your Day Crudely With Some Cyclecars: Cold Start

I’ve always been drawn to the extreme low ends of the automotive world, the cheapskates’ cars, the peoples’ cars, all that sort of thing. Somehow, I just respect them more, and find them more interesting, I think because I have a sort of weird fetish for restrictions. That’s why cars like the Bugatti Veyron never appealed to me; if you have no restrictions, of course you can do whatever you want, and that’s boring. Doing interesting and useful things while everything is stacked against you, that’s when things get exciting. Which is what I like about cyclecars, some of the most restriction-laden categories of cars ever.

You know about cyclecars, right? They’re really the first category of affordable car, pretty much ever. The earliest period of automobiles, from 1769 to about the 1890s, cars were really pretty experimental. Private ownership did occur, rarely, but you had to be rich and of a unique mindset. By the late 1800s, more “normal” people could buy a car, but you still needed to be rich. Cyclecars changed that, and in the short span of time that they existed – from about 1910 to the early 1920s – they were the way that non-wealthy people could have a car.

Well, barely a car, if we’re honest. Cyclecars were crude, crude, crude things, halfway between motorcycle and car, and often just simply deathtraps. They had small motorcyle-type engines, single-cylinders or maybe V-twins, and used chains and pulleys for getting the limited power to the wheels, or, often, wheel. Instead of differentials, they just relied on the slipping of belts, and frames were often just wood, with simple sheet-metal bodies, sometimes wicker, sometimes plywood. These were dirt-simple machines. Here’s a common sort of design of these:

You could probably build one of these in an afternoon with parts from Home Depot today, I bet. And that would be a fun way to spend a weekend, too. The design you see up there was typical of a lot of cyclecar builders, like Grafton or GN, and that torpedo-shaped fuel tank at the nose and general narrow proportions defined the interesting look of many of these:

Here’s a good video of a Grafton cyclecar in action so you can see what I mean:

It’s crude, but there’s an elegance in the crudeness isn’t there? I think so. In fact, I think sometimes the sort of classic cyclecar proportions made for some strangely elegant-and sleek-looking vehicles. Look at these:

That La Vigne is pretty cool looking! The long hood, the big wheels, it all just kind of works. It’s a dramatic look, but it was just about keeping things cheap; in modern money, most of these cyclecars would be selling for around $10,000 to $12,000 or so, somewhere in there. So they were cheap.

And how about this delivery cyclecar, the Imp Light Delivery Car:

That has a hot rod feel to it, right? And holy crap, look at the size of that chain!

I’d love to actually drive one of these one day; I’ve driven some similar things, but I’m especially curious about the Gigantic Chain Experience.

Oh, I learned something new and hilariously terrifying about cyclecars: they were so simple, they were often the target of mechanical “pranks.” Like this one:

“Another favorite was to rewind the wire-and-bobbin steering. To explain how this worked, the steering column extended as far forward in most of these cars as the tie rod. To steer, steel cable was wound several times around a bobbin at the bottom of the shaft. When the driver moved the steering wheel, the cable moved the tie rod. Pranksters, though, would unhook the cable, rewind it backward, and attach the ends again to the tie rod. So when the driver hopped in and started off down the road, he soon found that in steering to the right, the car would veer left, and vice versa. Ha, ha.”

A prank where you reverse how someone’s steering in their car works? Good one! I’m sure you’ll almost forget about the risk of brutal and bloody death because of all the laughing!

I wonder how often that really happened? Man, some people.