French city car "Minima": Smart, but unsuccessful

The drop height was, so to speak, maximum. In October 1973, the most spectacular premiere of the Paris Motor Show did not take place at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center, but on the 56th floor, almost at the top, in the recently opened Tour Montparnasse. There, with a fantastic panoramic view of the French capital and the usual crowd on their streets, stood a miniature vehicle that was to counteract the traffic collapse: the minima.

The orange two-seater was barely more than two meters long, had sliding doors at the sides and a flap at the rear. There was also the air-cooled two-cylinder boxer engine from the Citroën Dyane 6 with an output of 32 hp, which accelerated the extremely light car with tubular steel frame and plastic body to more than 100 km / h. The speedometer scale in the Spartan cockpit of the car dwarf reached at least 110 km / h.

The minimobil was conceived by French engineer and inventor Victor Bouffort together with the writer Henri Viard. The two had noticed in view of the increasingly congested streets of Paris, that in comparatively large cars almost always only one person was traveling, only rarely were there two or more. And so they consistently designed the Minima as an everyday car for the modern city dwellers: Compact enough to park it on the side of the road, and at the same time fast enough to swim with it on the motorway ring around Paris swiftly.

Perfect timing for the minima? Big mistake

That immediately after the presentation of the Minima also the first oil crisis broke out and the gasoline within a few weeks, firstly expensive and secondly scarce, Bouffort and Viard could not have guessed, of course, but it seemed to be another signal that they are accurate with their minima right.

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Exactly the opposite, however, was the case. After a short enthusiasm of the trade visitors about the cute and smart mini-car, nobody was interested in it anymore. Certainly not the car industry. The Minima prototype remained a unique piece. And the other ideas that Bouffort and Viard had come up with for the future of the wagon were also not pursued any further: even then, they had plans to provide hundreds of mini models in central zones of the big cities to passers-by as short-term rental cars - for free. A minimalist car-sharing system, but never realized.

In search of the minimal mobile

Anyone who thinks today about micro cars like Smart and car sharing providers like Car 2 go will certainly recognize the basic ideas in the minima. Only that Bouffort had them almost 50 years ago. After all, the inventor devised several other vehicles that were always extremely practical, robust and pragmatically constructed, including numerous military vehicles and even the motorhomes for a French polar expedition. Bouffort's most commercially successful creation, however, was the folding scooter Valmobile, which was made from a suitcase within - as the advertisement promised - 30 seconds to assemble a mini scooter for which there was even a sidecar.

Although no manufacturer in France also wanted to know anything about such a rudimentary means of transportation, the Japanese company Hirano made thousands of these suitcase scooters under license. Today, the original two-wheelers are traded among fans in Europe at prices of up to 5,000 euros.

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