How mini is mini, when it comes to cars?
Smaller than ‘normal’ cars. So, no Model T Fords; they were the standard popular American car of their day. And smaller than small cars too. For the sake of this exercise, I’ll set the old VW Beetle size as a somewhat flexible upper limit. I’ll leave out sports cars as well; although this will eliminate some of the more interesting Japanese kei cars like the Honda Beat, Autozam Mazdaspeed AZ-1, or Daihatsu Copen — they’ll get covered another time. How have I not covered sports cars yet?
I’ll leave out commercials too, so no small vans, pickups or food trucks. This should give us an interesting mix of European and Japanese vehicles. We’ll have seen some of these before, but some will be new to you. As always, there are a lot more available than what I show here, but I can’t build everything!
Here’s a BMW 3/15, not quite an Austin Seven produced under license, as there were quite a few differences, with more to come. Initially this was produced as the Dixi, by Fahrzuegfabrik Eisenach, before BMW took over. Having built this model, it’s amazing quite how primitive these were, but they provided previously-unaffordable motor transport. Yes, it’s a German kit.
The 4CV was Renault’s postwar small car, and their first foray into rear engines. Quite common in sixties Melbourne, these seemed to last better than the later Dauphines in these parts. A French Heller kit.
Austin’s new Seven (and initially advertised as such), the A30 showcased their first attempt at unitary construction, along with the debut of the long-lived A-series engine. Thoroughly conventional, but very slow, very noisy, and cramped, being smaller than the Morris Minor it was initially aimed at, being a foot shorter and on a 79.5” wheelbase. Did I say it was cramped?
Thirty years later BMW again licenses someone else’s small car design, this time from Iso SpA of Italy. This one’s an older Japanese kit from Gunze.
Contrary to what jokers suggested, the Messerschmitt wasn’t a plane minus the wings, nor did it use up war-surplus canopies. Another old Gunze kit.
Brilliance from Fiat, with the 600. A small but light water-cooled inline four at the rear of a nicely-shaped body. The first of a series of rear-engined models, including several from Fiat offshoots. You might think this was an Italian kit from Protar, ESCI, or Italeri — but no, it’s Gunze again.
More brilliance from Fiat. A tiny air-cooled vertical twin at the rear. Cramped and noisy, but it did the job if you couldn’t afford a 600, without the obvious step down to a bubble car. In my neighbourhood the 600 was the more common sighting, though a high school teacher had a 500.
Subaru attempted to meet the need for affordable mobility, and created a Japanese classic. Similar in layout to the Fiat 500.
Adventurous Honda followed Issigonis’ pattern for their first kei car, the N360, but with a small air-cooled OHC vertical twin.
I’ll count the Citroen as a mini car; surely anything with 602cc as the biggest available engine counts as mini!
Nissan’s first foray into FWD, the Cherry/Pulsar eventually outgrew Mini size. This coupe/hatch looks strange, but strange looks was a Nissan thing back then.
Back to basics. Renault’s earlier 4CV spawned larger offshoots (Dauphine, R8, R10); the 1972 R5 took the mechanicals of the front-drive R4 (engine behind gearbox) and put them into a smaller, sharper three door hatch, here in Alpine form.
I had to include this! Revell-Germany hurriedly produced a simple Trabbi model about the time the wall came down, then did this much more detailed kit some years later.
The first Civic was certainly a Mini competitor. This second-gen seemed more solid, but was still pretty much Mini size.
Honda revisited the sub-Civic class with the 1981 City, sold as the Jazz in Europe. That name sounds familiar…
Here it is! I was going to build my daughter’s second car, but hers was a VTi-S with a difficult-to-replicate bodykit and multi-spoke alloys, rather than this more basic model. A first-gen Fit to Americans; the kit came with badges to build it either way.
Here’s a Daihatsu Mira, here in Turbo TR-XX form. Basic Miras sold in small numbers in Australia during the eighties, but being a kei car were a bit too small to be popular at the time. And not in this colour!
Nissan rethought ‘mini,’ and slipped this March/Micra in under the (by now merely small) Pulsar.
Have to include a Mini. This one’s a late-nineties Cooper 1.3i, a recent Hasegawa kit.
Another Mini, an older kit of the mid-nineties limited edition Kensington.
A mini Mitsubishi. This Colt was a thoroughly ordinary front-drive five door hatch.
Fiat tried to reinvent the 500, and sort of painted themselves into a corner style-wise. Have they emerged yet?
Mercedes-Benz tries FWD with the first A-class, with mixed results – watch out for that moose! Odd styling makes it hard to tell if this is mini, or merely small. There was one in my town until a year or so back.
BMW bought the Mini name, and reinvented it for the new millennium. Heritage notwithstanding, it’s more of a small car than a Mini to my way of thinking. It feels much larger than the originals.
Next time: what I’ve been up to in 2025. See you then!
What a beautiful set of morsels these are, Master Pete: the yellow Jazz looks completely real to me.
Just to think, in the big world, there are millions upon millions of so many of these cars, probably more than any other models you have displayed.
Two grumbles. One, the Merc A class. I was so very captivated by the idea, then a bit non-plussed by the styling, then disturbed by the Moose matter, concerned by the glum road reports, and finally, utterly appalled when i went in one. Hard ride, noisy, knees-up seating, and all the interior made of five-day old Kraft single slices, all so utterly inferior to, say, a Mazda or a Honda littlie. And all for only about $40K AUD!
Two is the Austin A30. (Most US folk won’t have seen one IRL – they are unimaginably tiny, yet styled as if a long hood, etc, could still have a role for a thing designed to fit actual people). These plonkers were only 20-25 years old when i was kid, yet all those not smoking and blocking roads were abandoned in front yards. They just looked mean, and I don’t mean in the scary sense but the miserablist one. Surely, even for any half-grown Aussie, these mouldy peanuts could only be driven by sitting in the boot?
Still, I am glad you have honored these artifacts, and well. And why ever not? After all, there are people who collect beer cans and celebrity hair.
Justy, I’m glad your grumbles are with the cars themselves rather then my representations of them!
The Jazz: nothing like having one of these beasties on the back lawn for reference!
I’ve never ridden in an A-class (not any other Mercedes car), but what you say agrees with reports I’ve read. It could have been brilliant (if oddly styled), but they had to build it down to a price, and Mercedes-ness suffered for it.
When I discuss the A30 I’m mindful of the fact that we have readers from the UK, so I’m inclined to pull my punches a bit. But just consider: there were plans to underpin this horror with a simpler, plainer A20. Normal car proportions do not scale down to this size, not if you want anything more that a 2+2. Having ridden extensively in an A30 as a boy, I can only think buyers did not look at what other makers were offering.
Nice collection; I’m particularly fond of the Fiat 600 on top. These were so common in Austria in the 1950s.
Minor nit: the Messerschmitt did not use surplus aircraft canopies; they were designed specifically for the car. The airplane canopies were quite different.
Paul, I remember you commenting on the 600 in the background of a previous story. So I had to include it, of course! The more I read about these cars, the more I realize what a materpiece of design they were. And about that nit, I meant to imply that bit about the canopy was another urban myth, not that it was true.
I obviously (mis)read the text too fast…
Easy to do.
Nice work as always Peter. Love the little Honda 360. Take out the background and almost appeared real. The Subaru was pretty cool as well.
Thanks Jograd. Recent Hasegawa kits like the Honda are incredibly lifelike; somehow they really capture the look even better than the much-renowned Tamiya (that opinion will not be universally popular). Having built the Subaru straight afterwards made me appreciate how far they have come as a company.
Love these! And this may be the first time that I have actually owned several of the cars featured in your post as models. I had a new MINI of that generation as your final picture, and I still have a 3rd generation Honda Fit (Jazz), although one generation newer than the yellow one in your photo. You wouldn’t know if anyone produces a kit for that 3rd generation, would you?
You have the colors just perfect for the N360 and the Civic. I’ve seen both of those full size and those were the most common colors as I recall.
Finally, is there a tiny little moped in the back hatch of that Honda City? There ought to be.
Thaks Jeff, I figured I’d be hearing from you!
I always liked the look of those new MINIs, and my wife had a 3rd gen Cooper for a while (a competition prize). Nice cars, but there was always the feeling of ‘what if…?’
There’s never been a kit of a later Jazz/Fit, which seems a shame. My daughter now has a 2nd gen Jazz, and I’d like to have built that.
As regards the colours, Google was my friend there. I think we only received the N360 in white, red, and a dark blue. The colour I used here seems to have come in with the later N3 generation (this model’s an N2) – but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. When I built the Civic there was no such thing as a personal computer let alone Google – that was based on what I saw around me.
And yes, the City does come with the Motocompo scooter – but the hatch doesn’t open, so it’s permanently in place. Not that you can really see much of it.
Well done, Peter, proving small can be beautiful, at least in model form.
Sobering though to think that first generation of new MINI went out of production 19 years ago!
Thanks, Bernard. Was it that long already? Sobering indeed!
Impressive builds as always, and I say that as someone who’s also built most of these.
Who makes that A30 kit?
That’s a 3D printed kit from MiniRetro of Melbourne, Victoria. Duane has a Facebook page; a PM to him will give you pricing etc. He does some other oddities too, like a first-gen Corolla Sprinter and a lovely sixties Lombardi 850.
Peter: I had a 2007 Fit Sport (which I loved!) that got totaled in an accident; I replaced it with a 2nd generation 2012 Fit Sport…are there any model kits for the 2nd generation that you are aware of?? 🙂
Afraid not, Moparman. I can only assume the first-gen model wasn’t a good seller.
Not my sort of cars, but do enjoy them anyway, and of course the impressive model building skills.
My favorite is the light blue metallic Mini.
There is something about these small car kits that look more realistic than some of the American car kits, maybe the small size cars translate better to being scaled down, I don’t know.
The 3D printed kit of the A30 is also impressive, eventually someone will print out some Australian cars maybe.
Thanks jonco43. You raise an interesting point about these small cars looking more realistic than some of the larger American ones. I have often felt the same, but thought it was just because I’m more familiar with these smaller cars. I could hypothesize about it, but ultimately I’d just be guessing; I just don’t have the knowledge to explain why it is so. Suffice to say that some companies’ products are not as accurate as they could be, nor as accurate as we have come to expect these days.
The world of 3D printed kits is potentially huge, with no central point of entry to find out what’s available. Guess that’s why we have Google. There might be Australian cars out there, but I haven’t looked. Quality is potentially all over the shop though; you really need to see the product first or have a personal recommendation. I would have no qualms at all recommending the MiniRetro kits; this A30 was way better than I was expecting for the size.
Excellent work as usual.
It occurrs to me that my mini cars are mostly mini models as well.
I have a Trabant in 1:160, that was a gift from a fellow N-Scale train enthusiast who is a Trabi fan.
A Fiat Multipla in 1:87 and a 2CV in 1/43 scale.
I do have a Mini and maybe another 2CV in 1/25th scale, but in the unbuilt stash.
Thanks Dan. Just last week I was at my son’s place, looking over his evolving HO layout. He has some N scale track for a narrow gauge industrial railway around the cement works. His layout’s not at the stage of putting out people and vehicles yet, but he has quite a few. Taking a small car like a Trabant and reproducing it in N scale would take truly awesome talent on the part of the guys who make the tooling! A millimetre out could be really noticeable. No wonder some of those N-scale vehicles are so pricey.
A lovely collection of builds, Peter. I am in awe of the effort and attention to detail you put in to each one.