TINY TREASURES

An influx of tiny, efficient microcars might have made sense amid a postwar drive for cheap personal transport, but for BMC supremo Leonard Lord, it presented an opportunity. With the backdrop of the 1956 Suez fuel crisis upping the ante, he promptly told Alec Issigonis to drop everything and design a proper small car that would drive the “bloody awful bubble cars” off the streets.

The Mini, or the Morris Minor-Minor and Austin Seven to give it its launch titles, emerged in 1959 as a proper four-wheeled car wrapped up in city-sized package less than 10 feet long.

But it had been comprehensively beaten to the post by a diminutive Italian in the shape of Dante Giacosa’s Fiat ‘Nuova’ 500, which had already been on sale for two years and was even shorter at just over nine feet. Admittedly the earliest 500s had only two