HOME | DD

Description
Chapter Three. The non-bubble car

It seems as if the main characteristics of the microcar of this era were a strange look and an equally strange way to enter the vehicle. The Messerschmitt Kabinenroller had a canopy like that on a fighter aircraft, while the Isetta had a front door that was rather too literal, a feature it would share with the Heinkel Kabine and the Zündapp Janus.

More will be said about the Kabine and the Janus later on, but this chapter is about one of the longest lived and best selling microcars in Germany, the Goggomobil.

It is hard to think that the barely-remembered Goggomobil preceded the BMW version of the Isetta, outlasted it, and outsold it.  However, I think the reason why the Goggomobil is hardly remembered is the same reason why it sold so well and lasted so long in its time: it looks like an ordinary car.

Look at it!  It has a bonnet, a passenger cabin, and a boot, and while the order is the wrong way 'round, that was fairly normal for European small cars at the time, like the Typ 1 Beetle and the NSU Prinz.  To get in, you go to the side you're supposed to be on, and you open a car door, not a fighter cockpit or a 'fridge door. This was a non-bubble car.  This was a microcar for grown-ups.

Unlike aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt and aero-engine manufacturer BMW, Hans Glas GmbH had no basis in the aircraft industry.  Their main business was agricultural machinery, specifically machines for sowing crops. Hans Glas's son, Andreas, went to an agricultural machinery show in Modena, Italy, and saw what anyone around that time would see in Italian cities: scooters all around the place.

What he also saw was opportunity.  By mid-1951, Glas began production of their own scooter.  It was a typically German scooter, big, heavily constructed, and with a huge frame-mounted fairing all around the top of the front wheel.  Andreas Glas's enthusiasm for the project can probably be measured by the fact that he named the scooter after the nickname of his son, Hans, or, as Andreas and the elder Hans would call him, "Goggo".

A thing of beauty the Goggo scooter was not, but it was a rampant sales success.  In about five and a half years they sold more than forty thousand of them.  This encouraged Glas and had them work on the next step up.

In 1954, Glas introduced the Goggomobil microcar.  By early 1955, the Goggomobil had been refined into the T-250 model, the two-door, 2+2 saloon car that would become the staple of Goggomobil production. Refinement continued, with changes in manufacturing processes, and with the sliding windows giving way to roll-ups in 1956.

It was 1957, however, that was the banner year for changes in the Goggomobil line. The least of the changes was the addition of the Goggomobil Transporter.  This was done at the request of the German postal service, which wanted a small van for deliveries on narrow streets. The German postal service eventually bought about two thousand of them, or more than half of the model's production.  Most of the other Transporters were bought by municipal services for use as street sweepers or other forms of urban utility uses.

The other body style introduced in 1957, however, was far more successful.  The TS Coupe was a slightly less practical and more ornamental version of the Goggomobil.  It was for someone on a Goggomobil budget who wanted a bit of style. The wraparound rear windscreen was quite fashionable, and the purely cosmetic chrome grille reminds some viewers a bit of Alfa Romeo, while others are reminded of the 1958 Edsel.

In any case, the TS was successful in Germany and even more so in the export market.  It was also more likely than the T saloon car to have the larger engines that became available in '57.  In addition to the old 250, one could order a 300 cc engine, or even a 400 cc engine if one were a speed demon... or an American, which is the same thing, really. American export versions had seven-inch sealed-beam headlights, a fuel-oil mixing system (I forgot to mention that it was two-stroke, didn't I?), and the 400 cc engine.

1957 also brought another development from Glas.  Having transitioned from a successful scooter manufacturer to a successful microcar manufacturer, Glas seemed to believe there was nowhere to go but up. The biggest news from Glas in 1957, literally, was a prototype of a new car which would be a step up in size and price from the Goggomobil.  As would be expected, the bigger car had contemporary styling and looked like a normal car, unlike the BMW 600 against which it would compete.  Like the BMW 600, the new car had a 600 cc air-cooled flat-twin engine, which was actually designed by an ex-BMW engineer. However, unlike almost every other car in its class, the T-600 had a front-mounted engine driving the rear wheels through a driveshaft.

Initially called the Goggomobil T-600, the new car began to reach customers in 1958. By 1960, the name had changed to the Glas Isar, by which time a 700 cc engine had become optional.

Before going on to what became of Glas and Goggomobil in the 1960s, I should look at something else that happened at Glas around 1957 or 1958. Somewhere around that time, an Australian car salesman named Bill Buckle flew to Bavaria and asked to speak with the management at Glas.  Somehow, despite Buckle's inability to speak German and the lack of English interpreters at Glas, they struck a deal: Glas would provide Buckle with engines and unit bodies without any body panels, and Buckle would assemble the cars with Australian-built body panels.

The coachbuilding was by local boat builder Stan Brown, and the T-series saloon cars and the TS-series coupes looked much like their steel-panelled cousins in Germany.  However, Buckle's line of Goggomobils included a Carryall van that looked quite different from the Transporter, and a car that, while being completely the same underneath, looked nothing like any Goggomobil made in Germany.

As a salesman, Buckle understood the concept of the halo car, a car that could draw people to the showroom where you could sell them other cars while they gawked at the dream car.  So he turned the Goggomobil into something it was never meant to be: a sports roadster.  It was called the Goggomobil Dart, and Buckle sold about seven hundred of them in three years.

Back to Glas: The 1960s saw a rapid expansion in both the number and the size of models being sold by Glas.  First there was the 04 series, starting with the 1004 in 1961.  This had a one litre, four cylinder, liquid cooled engine that was the first ever to use a toothed belt to power an overhead camshaft.  They later brought out a 1204 and a 1304, each with a correspondingly larger engine.  Each engine size had an available high-performance TS version.Then, in 1964, came the 1300GT, a Frua-designed coupe with the 1304TS mechanicals underneath.  Later in 1964 came a larger saloon car with a larger engine, the Ghia-designed 1700. Of course, what was next was the 1700GT, with the 1700's engine dropped into the 1300GT.

The crowning example of Glas's expansion frenzy was the 2600, a Frua-designed, V-8 powered luxury GT coupe.  The 2600 resembled Frua's design for the Maserati Mistral so much that it was nicknamed the "Glaserati".  The V-8 engine was basically two 1300 engines joined at the crankshaft, with the overhead camshaft of each cylinder bank driven by its own belt.

All this meant two things: One, the Goggomobil was pretty much ignored; its only real development in the Sixties was a change from rear-hinged doors to conventional front-hinged doors in 1964, and two, they spent a lot of money on a lot of new designs with a lot of new problems to work out.  As a result of the latter, the spending on the new projects and the spending on fixing the old ones eventually caused Glas's huge expansion to burst.  By 1966, with everything except the Goggomobil losing money, Glas's automotive division proved unsustainable and, at the end of the year, was completely taken over by BMW.

BMW quickly axed the Isar, the 04 series, and the 1700, selling the Isar's tooling to a manufacturer in Argentina and the 1700's to their distributor in South Africa, who started making the BMW 1800SA with the 1700's unit body and BMW's 1800 cc engine.  BMW enlarged the 2600's V-8 engine to three litres and continued to sell the 2600 as the BMW-Glas 3000.  The 1300GT and 1700GT were reworked into the 1600GT, replacing the Glas engine and live axle with the BMW New Class engine and semi-trailing arm rear suspension, and grafting in a BMW double-kidney into the Glas's grille.

And the Goggomobil?  As embarrassed as BMW was to be back in the microcar business, they kept making the Goggomobil until late 1968, when production of all Glas-based cars ended and the factories were retooled to make parts for BMWs.

Description
Chapter Three. The non-bubble car

It seems as if the main characteristics of the microcar of this era were a strange look and an equally strange way to enter the vehicle. The Messerschmitt Kabinenroller had a canopy like that on a fighter aircraft, while the Isetta had a front door that was rather too literal, a feature it would share with the Heinkel Kabine and the Zündapp Janus.

More will be said about the Kabine and the Janus later on, but this chapter is about one of the longest lived and best selling microcars in Germany, the Goggomobil.

It is hard to think that the barely-remembered Goggomobil preceded the BMW version of the Isetta, outlasted it, and outsold it.  However, I think the reason why the Goggomobil is hardly remembered is the same reason why it sold so well and lasted so long in its time: it looks like an ordinary car.

Look at it!  It has a bonnet, a passenger cabin, and a boot, and while the order is the wrong way 'round, that was fairly normal for European small cars at the time, like the Typ 1 Beetle and the NSU Prinz.  To get in, you go to the side you're supposed to be on, and you open a car door, not a fighter cockpit or a 'fridge door. This was a non-bubble car.  This was a microcar for grown-ups.

Unlike aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt and aero-engine manufacturer BMW, Hans Glas GmbH had no basis in the aircraft industry.  Their main business was agricultural machinery, specifically machines for sowing crops. Hans Glas's son, Andreas, went to an agricultural machinery show in Modena, Italy, and saw what anyone around that time would see in Italian cities: scooters all around the place.

What he also saw was opportunity.  By mid-1951, Glas began production of their own scooter.  It was a typically German scooter, big, heavily constructed, and with a huge frame-mounted fairing all around the top of the front wheel.  Andreas Glas's enthusiasm for the project can probably be measured by the fact that he named the scooter after the nickname of his son, Hans, or, as Andreas and the elder Hans would call him, "Goggo".

A thing of beauty the Goggo scooter was not, but it was a rampant sales success.  In about five and a half years they sold more than forty thousand of them.  This encouraged Glas and had them work on the next step up.

In 1954, Glas introduced the Goggomobil microcar.  By early 1955, the Goggomobil had been refined into the T-250 model, the two-door, 2+2 saloon car that would become the staple of Goggomobil production. Refinement continued, with changes in manufacturing processes, and with the sliding windows giving way to roll-ups in 1956.

It was 1957, however, that was the banner year for changes in the Goggomobil line. The least of the changes was the addition of the Goggomobil Transporter.  This was done at the request of the German postal service, which wanted a small van for deliveries on narrow streets. The German postal service eventually bought about two thousand of them, or more than half of the model's production.  Most of the other Transporters were bought by municipal services for use as street sweepers or other forms of urban utility uses.

The other body style introduced in 1957, however, was far more successful.  The TS Coupe was a slightly less practical and more ornamental version of the Goggomobil.  It was for someone on a Goggomobil budget who wanted a bit of style. The wraparound rear windscreen was quite fashionable, and the purely cosmetic chrome grille reminds some viewers a bit of Alfa Romeo, while others are reminded of the 1958 Edsel.

In any case, the TS was successful in Germany and even more so in the export market.  It was also more likely than the T saloon car to have the larger engines that became available in '57.  In addition to the old 250, one could order a 300 cc engine, or even a 400 cc engine if one were a speed demon... or an American, which is the same thing, really. American export versions had seven-inch sealed-beam headlights, a fuel-oil mixing system (I forgot to mention that it was two-stroke, didn't I?), and the 400 cc engine.

1957 also brought another development from Glas.  Having transitioned from a successful scooter manufacturer to a successful microcar manufacturer, Glas seemed to believe there was nowhere to go but up. The biggest news from Glas in 1957, literally, was a prototype of a new car which would be a step up in size and price from the Goggomobil.  As would be expected, the bigger car had contemporary styling and looked like a normal car, unlike the BMW 600 against which it would compete.  Like the BMW 600, the new car had a 600 cc air-cooled flat-twin engine, which was actually designed by an ex-BMW engineer. However, unlike almost every other car in its class, the T-600 had a front-mounted engine driving the rear wheels through a driveshaft.

Initially called the Goggomobil T-600, the new car began to reach customers in 1958. By 1960, the name had changed to the Glas Isar, by which time a 700 cc engine had become optional.

Before going on to what became of Glas and Goggomobil in the 1960s, I should look at something else that happened at Glas around 1957 or 1958. Somewhere around that time, an Australian car salesman named Bill Buckle flew to Bavaria and asked to speak with the management at Glas.  Somehow, despite Buckle's inability to speak German and the lack of English interpreters at Glas, they struck a deal: Glas would provide Buckle with engines and unit bodies without any body panels, and Buckle would assemble the cars with Australian-built body panels.

The coachbuilding was by local boat builder Stan Brown, and the T-series saloon cars and the TS-series coupes looked much like their steel-panelled cousins in Germany.  However, Buckle's line of Goggomobils included a Carryall van that looked quite different from the Transporter, and a car that, while being completely the same underneath, looked nothing like any Goggomobil made in Germany.

As a salesman, Buckle understood the concept of the halo car, a car that could draw people to the showroom where you could sell them other cars while they gawked at the dream car.  So he turned the Goggomobil into something it was never meant to be: a sports roadster.  It was called the Goggomobil Dart, and Buckle sold about seven hundred of them in three years.

Back to Glas: The 1960s saw a rapid expansion in both the number and the size of models being sold by Glas.  First there was the 04 series, starting with the 1004 in 1961.  This had a one litre, four cylinder, liquid cooled engine that was the first ever to use a toothed belt to power an overhead camshaft.  They later brought out a 1204 and a 1304, each with a correspondingly larger engine.  Each engine size had an available high-performance TS version.Then, in 1964, came the 1300GT, a Frua-designed coupe with the 1304TS mechanicals underneath.  Later in 1964 came a larger saloon car with a larger engine, the Ghia-designed 1700. Of course, what was next was the 1700GT, with the 1700's engine dropped into the 1300GT.

The crowning example of Glas's expansion frenzy was the 2600, a Frua-designed, V-8 powered luxury GT coupe.  The 2600 resembled Frua's design for the Maserati Mistral so much that it was nicknamed the "Glaserati".  The V-8 engine was basically two 1300 engines joined at the crankshaft, with the overhead camshaft of each cylinder bank driven by its own belt.

All this meant two things: One, the Goggomobil was pretty much ignored; its only real development in the Sixties was a change from rear-hinged doors to conventional front-hinged doors in 1964, and two, they spent a lot of money on a lot of new designs with a lot of new problems to work out.  As a result of the latter, the spending on the new projects and the spending on fixing the old ones eventually caused Glas's huge expansion to burst.  By 1966, with everything except the Goggomobil losing money, Glas's automotive division proved unsustainable and, at the end of the year, was completely taken over by BMW.

BMW quickly axed the Isar, the 04 series, and the 1700, selling the Isar's tooling to a manufacturer in Argentina and the 1700's to their distributor in South Africa, who started making the BMW 1800SA with the 1700's unit body and BMW's 1800 cc engine.  BMW enlarged the 2600's V-8 engine to three litres and continued to sell the 2600 as the BMW-Glas 3000.  The 1300GT and 1700GT were reworked into the 1600GT, replacing the Glas engine and live axle with the BMW New Class engine and semi-trailing arm rear suspension, and grafting in a BMW double-kidney into the Glas's grille.

And the Goggomobil?  As embarrassed as BMW was to be back in the microcar business, they kept making the Goggomobil until late 1968, when production of all Glas-based cars ended and the factories were retooled to make parts for BMWs.