You may recall last week we wrote about all the BMWs in the Autopian staff’s various fleets and the relative amounts of delight or regret they provide. My name was not on that list, mostly because I don’t own any BMWs, at least none I’m aware of. That’s because I haven’t been able to find my favorite BMW – a BMW 600 – at a price I can afford or not made out of 75% rust and 25% despair. In case you’ve forgotten how remarkable the BMW 600 was, let’s look through this 1957 brochure to remind ourselves, why not?
The 600 is often mistaken for an Isetta, which it is clearly inspired by, but is actually not really an Isetta. Yes, it has the Isetta’s same idiosyncratic front-face door and general gumdrop shape, but beyond that it’s got very different engineering. It’s a true rear-engined car, unlike the sorta-mid-engined Isetta, and the engine in the 600 is a motorcycle-derived BMW flat-twin; much more substantial than the one-banger in the Isetta.
And, the 600 is stretched compared to the Isetta, with a real second row of seats and even a door just to get to them, like a king or emperor or sultan might have. And, a decent-sized luggage well behind that!
It’s all so clever! Look:
Sure, the shape seems weird to us, but really the 600 was a study in making a roomy and practical small car by just ruthlessly getting rid of everything you don’t need. It’s an exercise in nearly kink-like austerity in the same way the Citroën 2CV was, just with a very different approach. BMW was aware of how different the 600 looked from conventional small cars of the era, and played up that difference, as you can see here:
The blue shaded parts I think represent the traditional three-box style they were pushing away from, though to be fair, the only three-box car this tiny was probably a Vespa 400 or maybe an Autobianchi Bianchina.
The amount of utility possible from this peculiar design is quite impressive; you could think of the 600 as a sort of little van, with a front door, and BMW actually did seem to think that: look at the bottom picture here:
The show all the normal configurations: rear seat up, rear seat down, and then that last one with a whole freaking ladder in there requires an optional single bucket front seat instead of the usual full-width bench, but in that case you could treat a 600 like a little, front-loading (and side-loading) van!
Of course, it was mostly intended for people, like those four illustrated people up there, happily egressing or ingressing, like real ballers.
The brochure also has some beauty shots of the 600, here with a photographer holding a Hasselblad camera, and if we imagine a colossal mirror in front of them, perhaps this is a selfie? Also, note the fantastic front turn indicators integrated into the lines of the bumper. I love that.
You know what else I love? This page showing that engine and how it relates to BMW’s motorcycle-and-sidecar racers, which are just bonkers-looking machines. I also love how in the English translation of this brochure this picture of the engine (sadly in just black-and-white) is accompanied by this text:
Oh, I’m sure that’s true. In fact, one of my go-to pickup lines is to find some sexy person who looks interested in technical perfection, and then let my laminated picture of a BMW 600 engine housing “fall” out of my wallet. It never fails me.
This is also something very rarely seen in car advertising anymore: the diagram of field of vision. I like that it shows a stoplight as a height reference, because that is very useful. Also, with no hood in the way, the forward visibility of the 600 is fantastic.
My friend Jonee at the Petersen Museum once told me, of the BMW 600, that it’s everything anyone technically needs in a small car. And I think he’s right. But, sadly, I think we’re in the minority, because nothing really looks like a 600 anymore. Except that Microlino, I guess.
So, I’m assuming that the BMW 700 was BMW’s realization that crumple zones in the front (and a horizontal surface in the back so that designers could add fins, because 1959) would be a good thing.
That’s a TLR (twin lens reflex), and Hasselblad never made that type of camera. Probably a Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex or Rolleiflex (since Germans will German).
I still believe it’s the perfect small car. I had a rough one once that I pulled out of a chicken shack in Northern California. It was a Euro spec car and I never learned its history. I only got it running, not really driving, before I had to give it up for lack of space, but it filled me with joy every time I saw it in my garage. BMW didn’t sell as many as they expected because by the time it was released, it had too much competition from Beetles and Minis and people didn’t want weird-looking little cars any more. But, it provided the base for the 700 which was the car that really saved BMW.
This was my dream car when I was a kid.
I had weird dreams.
I still do.
You can’t even change a lightbulb with that ladder!
BMW 700 superiority.
The cancelled Apple car probably did. In bright jelly colours. And no need for a traditional steering wheel because they would call it an i-wheel and base it on a mouse….
“…but is actually not really an Isetta.”
I agree but the way it was marketed in the US didn’t exactly help clarify this:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53656101098_942f38e9da_c.jpg
I mean, does the i3 kind of look like the 600 from a profile point of view?
I love it so much. <3 <3 <3
My friend had a real Isetta, he must have owned that for 15 years or more, I only ever saw it driven maybe 3 times, not the most reliable of vehicles and his was in really good condition.
I see the gas monkeys are doing something with a 600 and one of those V8 barstools and I think they may have actually made the barstool more dangerous.
BMW’s brochures from the late ’70s, which were thick, beautiful, expensive things, also often had field of vision diagrams, but they were overhead shots, showing how little the pillars infringed on a 360-degree view from the driver’s seat. I don’t think many cars could use that as a selling point anymore, but I can confirm that my ’70s BMW (a ’73 Bavaria) had fantastic outward visibility.
Yeah, the utterly decadent opulence of the BMW 600, with its *multiple* doors, would’ve come in handy for the hapless parking valet who parked my ex-FIL’s childhood neighbor’s Isetta. The neighbor had a very early Isetta, without even a canvas sunroof, that she would drive from Oak Ridge, TN (a mecca for unconventional cars on account of the community of engineers & physicists who had moved there for obvious reasons) to New York City (!!) and one time in NYC she went to lunch at a restaurant that had valet parking; when she came back from lunch the parking service couldn’t find her keys or even the valet. After some searching in the parking garage they found the valet napping in the Isetta; it turned out he had driven into a parking space facing the wall, couldn’t open the door, couldn’t figure out how to reverse, & simply decided to take a nap. With some Isettas (and many so-called bubble cars and microcars) in order to reverse the driver would have to turn off the engine and turn the ignition key the other way to start the engine in the opposite direction so that first gear became reverse gear (shifting into the upper gears while reversing was obviously not recommended with these early three-wheeled Isettas.)
Great story, thank you for sharing. While some BMW Isettas had no reverse, or blocked out reverse (to be registered as motorcycles in some markets, UK?), most actually had a regular reverse gear. I believe the shifter was difficult to operate and the shift pattern was very odd, though. The trick about reversing the crankshaft rotation only works on (some) two-stroke engines. BMW Isettas were four-strokes. You wrote that it was an very early model. Could it have been an original Iso Isetta from Italy? Those were two-strokes, but I’m not sure about the reverse going capabilities of those.
Yeah, good question. While I’m not all that well-versed in microcars & bubble cars I did notice that the engines used by BMW were four-stroke so I was indeed wondering about pre-BMW Isettas. Possible that my ex-FIL was remembering details about other microcars & bubble cars from his childhood and surmised the valet’s dilemma to be due to the ignition key reversal procodure as used in an altogether different microcar. After all, Oak Ridge, TN, as noted previously, was quite the mecca for unconventional cars. Apparently there was at least one Messerschmitt Kabinenroller and also there were at least two (!!) Vespa 400s in the area in addition to that Isetta. In any case, that neighbor with the Isetta was a real hero for driving her Isetta from Oak Ridge to NYC and back. And multiple times, no less.
Now I want to see a 2024-designed 600. Maybe based on a recent Mini but turned front to back.
Agree it would be cool, but the lack of a crumple zone would never make it past safety requirements.
It would be slightly smaller than a Tahoe.
Imagine how much fun the world would be if these were the only cars ever built. It’d seem like a giant ant farm.
We’ll allow Fiat 500s and Citroen 2CVs in our anthill but no insects with over 2 cylinders.
What about Panhard, with the Dyna Z, the PL 17, the CD, and the 24?? All those have just 2 cylinders. My ’54 Dyna Z can seat six people and is actually rather comparable in size to a Volvo 144 or 240 (I actually still had a ’70 144 when I acquired the Dyna Z so I had an actual comparison at hand) so it’d be positively gargantuan in a land of Isettas, 500s, and even 2CVs. Yeah, any chance I have of name-dropping the fact I have a Panhard Dyna Z I’ll take, ha.
I think we’ll invoke a 20hp limit. If your Panhard is under that you deserve to join. Hell, you own a Panhard, you’re in.
Lol. Thanks! The Dyna Z’s flat two engine might have all of 851 cc but thanks to some sophisticated engineering such as needle-roller main bearings for the crankshaft and torsion bars in lieu of springs for the valves it produces 42 hp. More than double the proposed hp cutoff, ha. For comparison, a ’54 VW Beetle has four cylinders totalling a honkin’ big 1192 cc but only produces 36 hp! Panhard also offered the Tigre variant which tuned the engine to produce 50 to 52 hp and they also offered optional tiger-striped upholstery (thankfully not real tiger skin) which, alas, all too few buyers chose so such an option is rare but awesome:
https://mojklasyk.pl/media/djmediatools/cache/components/com_djclassifieds/images/item/1/1200×800-crop-100-1058_84268022-a4f8-48bb-8134-f729f24b81a7.jpeg
And
https://mojklasyk.pl/media/djmediatools/cache/components/com_djclassifieds/images/item/1/1200×800-crop-100-1058_6ac1b3be-cfe5-4148-8cc4-5ad2559a4818.jpeg
The Lane Motor Museum has a 600, perhaps predictably.
So is this considered a two door or a three door?
And is there an accessory tent for camping?
????
In the sense you put up a tent and drive it i, sure 🙂
And the crumple zone is inches wide!
If I was interested in “technical perfection” I never would have bought that Renault Alliance.
Well, 19hp ain’t gonna set the world on fire, but I love the car’s cheerful mien.
If I wanted a car that set the world on fire, I’d just spray salt water on an EV battery.
I’ve only seen one of these in real life, and it was a non-running example that was squirreled away in a WWII exhibit at a museum. The 600 was awkwardly parked next to some old WWII-era fighter planes, like it wasn’t a civilian vehicle and also decades too new. It was fun to see how similar the front and rear are, with the headlights being the main differentiator between the two.
Not Hasselblad, Rolleiflex.
Considering the author of this piece and the total lack of mention of a particular component of this car, I have to conclude that there is absolutely nothing interesting about the taillights on a BMW 600.
There is a weird taillight thing happening here, though! The lights shown in the very first photo are not the standard taillights, which are small, square wrap-around units. We demand an explanation of these taillight shenanigans!
You’re right! What the hell is going on with those taillights? Never seen those on a 600 before.
So this thing had 19 Teutonic ponies at 4000rpm? Not exactly Autobahn material. Still, I love the bumper-smile, and this was definitely a cheap, cheerful little runabout.
I wonder if those 19 horses would be Shire horses or Shetland ponies? It makes a difference. .
Lippizaners
Now I want to know how the measurement from gas pedal to the top of the rear seat back compares to that of a modern minivan. And also why that would matter to anyone except us nerds.