Small wonders

Black ties were hunted, florists consulted and sombre outfits whisked to the dry cleaners… The bony digit of extinction had beckoned the small car and written of its demise on the wall in letters 10 feet high. Briefly, it seemed its time was up and that it, along with the battleship and the supersonic airliner, was about to become nothing more than a memory.

The small car really did come painfully close to being mentioned in the past tense, and not that long ago. And it didn’t matter that its brush with mortality was more incidental than intended.  We need small cars, more than ever, especially on these ever more crowded isles of ours. But we almost lost them.

Small city cars, urban runabouts or – if you really must – ‘private transport solutions’, have for years provided not just mobility, but been a rite of passage. Freed from the shackles of L-plates, they gave newly minted drivers so much more than transport. They gave them freedom. And while many progressed to larger, more expensive and luxurious cars, some were so smitten by the small car’s beguiling combination of intelligent engineering and deft packaging they stayed loyal to arguably the most ingenious and challenging automotive breed of them all.