A Microlino EV on the opening day of the Geneva International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2024. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
If there is such a thing as a minicar safari, I felt like I was on one last month while traveling through Northern Italy. The neighborhoods I explored were full of tiny vehicles that I had read about in the US but never seen in the wild.
A few highlights: While biking through Turin I spotted a Microlino, the battery-powered reboot of a 1950s “bubble car”; a few minutes later I paused to snap pictures of a cube-like Citroën Ami, which has attracted a passionate fan base in Paris. I later made my way to Milan, where I found a bicolored German Smart ForTwo zipping past a row of on-street parking spots, one of which was shared by a Fiat Topolino and a motorcycle. Later that day I came across a Biro, a machine so diminutive that you can drive it on bike lanes in Amsterdam.
A Citroën Ami takes a spin past the Louvre in Paris. Photographer: Getty Images/Getty Images Europe
The advantages of such minicars are manifold. For one, they can comfortably fit inside parking spots that would not accommodate a typical sedan, let alone a hulking SUV. Minicars are also cheaper than a full-sized car; the bare-bones Ami retails for around €6,000 ($6,600), a fraction of what a typical new vehicle costs. Their modest weight, low hoods, and small blind spots minimize threats to pedestrians and cyclists. Their environmental impact is similarly downsized.
And lest we forget, driving a minicar can be an absolute blast. “Urban delight,” proclaimed a Microlino reviewer in The Verge. An Autopian headline declared that “The Endearing New Fiat Topolino Will Make Your Heart Melt Like Chocolate In A Hot Car.”
But back in the US, none of the minicars I ogled in Italy are available. The primary reason is not a lack of consumer interest, but regulatory roadblocks erected by inflexible public officials who are preventing Americans from enjoying some of the world’s most creative, exciting and practical innovations in urban mobility.
As I explained earlier in Bloomberg CityLab, I’m using the term “minicar” to cover a wide range of conveyances that are bigger and faster than a bicyclebut smaller and slower (and almost always less expensive) than a full-sized automobile. Some can accommodate two passengers, while others manage one or two more.
Just about all entrants in the newest generation of minicars are battery-powered, as electrification has sparked a surge of new interest in small zero-emissions machines that can thrive in congested urban areas. Since most minicar trips are relatively short, models may require only modest-sized batteries with around 50 miles of range.
Motorists in Japan are often cited as minicar mavens. For 75 years, the country has been the home of kei cars and trucks — small urban vehicles with their own regulatory classification, established size limits and safety rules. Now comprising about a third of Japanese new car sales, kei vehicles offer a less expensive and more maneuverable alternative to full-sized cars and pickups. Minicars have also found eager buyers in Asian nations such as China, where the Wuling Mini EV, costing well under $10,000, was for a time the country’s most popular electric vehicle.
With its narrow streets and low urban speed limits, Europe, too, has been an inviting market for nimble minicars, particularly as cities like Paris and Amsterdam convert thousands of on-street parking spots to bike lanes and public spaces. “It’s become more and more difficult to enter cities with full-blown cars, due to a lack of parking,” said Annick Roetynck, the head of LEVA-EU, a European trade association that represents manufacturers of light electric vehicles. “In Europe, it is the cities that are pushing the mobility policies. They are getting fed up with too many cars, and the cars are too big — they constitute a greater danger for children.”
A micro-sized car is right at home on the streets of Amsterdam. Photo: David Dudley/Bloomberg
Roetynck added that minicars can also be well-suited “for people who live in villages and need to travel some distances in the countryside,” using winding roads where traffic seldom exceeds 70 kilometers per hour (43 miles per hour).
The European Union has established two regulatory categories for “quadricyles” that are capped at 45 kph (28 mph) and 90 kph (56 mph), respectively. Such machines are subject to rules and safety requirements that are less stringent than those for full-sized cars. Driver’s licenses, for instance, are typically not necessary to operate the slower class of quadricycles, opening their use up to operators as young as 14.
US vehicle regulators have provided less flexibility. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a division of the Department of Transportation, requires new cars sold in the US to adhere to the exhaustive Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which cover everything from windshields to seat belts. Unlike Europe, NHTSA has established only one category for smaller four-wheeled cars that can’t meet those safety standards: Low-Speed Vehicles (LSV), which are capped at just 25 mph. At the state level, departments of motor vehicles generally require vehicles to be classified as either an automobile or LSV to receive the registration that permits them to be legally operated on public roads. (In 2016 the federal government did create an exception for “autocycles,” three-wheeled machines that are generally treated as motorcycles.)
The rigidity of NHTSA categorizations for four-wheeled vehicles — car, LSV, or nothing — leaves little space for many minicars that are popular abroad. Outside the US, most minicars can exceed the 25-mph LSV maximum, and they typically lack the airbags and other costly safety equipment required to meet federal crash standards. (A rare exception, the Smart ForTwo, left the US market in 2019.) In 2008, NHTSA rejected a petition to create a new category of “medium speed vehicles” traveling at up to 35 mph, which would have accommodated many of the quadricycles popular in Europe.
Fiat’s diminutive Topolino, like its sibling Citroën Ami, is classified as a quadricycle by EU regulators. Photographer: Stefano Guidi/Getty Images Europe
Minicar makers could still sell their models in the US if they cap their speed at 25 mph, a move that makers of the Microlino and Ami have signaled might be in the works. But doing so hampers the vehicles’ usefulness and potentially their safety, particularly on wider streets where bigger and heavier cars are moving far faster.
The US does offer a workaround for die-hard minicar fans. According to the Vehicle Safety Compliance Act of 1988, foreign vehicles that are more than 25 years old can be legally imported to the US without complying with federal safety standards. That policy is designed to keep unsafe and polluting models out of the country, while still allowing hobbyists to acquire “vintage” models for their collections. The 25-year threshold has fostered a thriving domestic market for aging Japanese kei cars, whose popularity seems to be rising (particularly among those who desire a small truck with a bed as capacious as a full-sized pickup).
But that regulatory back door is now under threat. In recent months several state regulators have taken aim at kei cars, refusing to provide them with new registrations and even canceling those already issued, sowing considerable angst across tight-knit communities of kei enthusiasts. Anti-kei moves have been reported in states including Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island, Texas, and Georgia, where department of motor vehicle officials have apparently decided that kei cars are unsafe. (Citizen groups in Texas and Massachusetts have successfully lobbied their DMVs to reverse course and affirm the legality of kei cars and trucks.)
The kei car clampdown reveals a persistent myopia in American automobile policy, where safety rules have for decades revolved around drivers and passengers alone.
Minicars may not meet US crash regulations, but they seem amply safe for their occupants in urban neighborhoods where roadways are limited to 30 mph or less. After all, golf carts — which are even slower than Low-Speed Vehicles and have escaped NHTSA oversight entirely — are an increasingly common presence on public roads in cities like New Orleans and regions like Central Oregon, far from the retirement and resort communities where they have long been used.
If minicars appear more dangerous on faster arterials and highways, don’t blame the minicars; look to the gigantic SUVs and pickups that dominate US fleets and could flatten smaller machines (not to mention cyclists or pedestrians) in a high-speed collision. Compared to the typical American automobile, minicars are remarkably benign urban conveyances when considering the safety of those outside of them — which US regulators seldom do.
It is darkly ironic that the state officials who dismiss minicars as deathtraps still gladly register behemoths like a Hummer weighing 9,600 pounds — equivalent to three Toyota Corollas or 12 Biros — that threaten anyone trying to walk, bike or operate a smaller vehicle. Meanwhile, deaths among American pedestrians and cyclists both recently hit 40-year highs, a trend that researchers have linked to car bloat.
The absurdity of deeming minicars unsafe while ignoring the danger of gigantic SUVs and trucks reflects a tragic blind spot of US car regulations, which have for decades conflated “car safety” with “car occupant safety.” The result has been an arms race of vehicle size, as well as a refusal to allow Americans to enjoy the myriad advantages that minicars bring to urban residents across Europe and Asia.
Unfortunately, it looks like I will need to fly overseas if I want to continue my minicar safari. That’s a shame; I’d much rather do it here at home.