How To Drive a 1959 BMW Isetta Bubble Car

hello everybody today i am driving the one thing guaranteed to outshine any supercar at any meet anywhere a bmw isetta bubble [Music] i can actually confirm this theory is true because i met this car's owner nick atomy up here in scotland three months ago i told him i was hosting my own meat via roadster a week later and that he should really bring this so i could see it he did and the moment he parked it next to my f12 the ferrari began to wear a cloak of invisibility because nobody cared about that instead rightly so they all wanted to know about this the history of the isetta is actually particularly interesting today they're best known as a bmw but they were not the firm to first come up with it it is in fact the brainchild of an italian company called eso in fact the name isetta simply means the little eso and if you thought lambo doors were cool you ain't seen nothing yet eso made amongst other things fridges so to get into this car you actually need to operate a fridge door inside you will find simply two seats with a relatively generous storage area behind them the steering column and instrument move with the front door and in the event of an accident you're supposed to escape through the canvas roof at the top that's provided of course that you have survived behind the seats in the original eso version you would have found a very unusual 236 cc four-stroke engine good enough for about nine and a half horsepower the naught to 30 time was in the order of 30 seconds and the naught to 60 time was no because the top speed was 47 mile an hour it was never a roaring success and eso struggled to sell just about a thousand of them bmw though saw the value in what they were creating because they needed a car to sell to the post-war german economy which required cheap affordable transport they bought not just the rights to the car but also the tooling however when it landed back in munich they realized that not much about the original car was acceptable to them so they went about changing so much of it that not one single component is actually interchangeable with the original italian built car the engine grew ever so slightly by about 10 cc and started to make an incredible 12 horsepower the overall design is much the same and to the casual observer it doesn't look any different but trust me it was luckily for bmw their efforts were rewarded because they also sold 160 times more of these than eso did of theirs despite the bmw badging this particular car wasn't actually built by them it was instead constructed in brighton of all places you see having already bought the rights to the isetta themselves bmw realized there would be a demand for in other markets they simply could not fulfill so they in turn licensed it to various other countries including great britain it was constructed at a former site of the locomotive works of brighton in a hangar that formerly had been used for creating trains the issue was there were only two ways to access that particular building one was by rail the other was by a flight of 100 steps so these cars were sent out by rail on the same train that delivered supplies to the factory this has essentially the same specification as a bmw built car with its later uprated 300cc engine but there are some crucial differences the most obvious is the fact this is right hand drive this did cause some issues because the engine is largely on the right hand side of the car so a counterweight had to be fitted in order to balance things out also because of uk legislation the majority of cars sold in britain were not actually four wheelers instead three wheelers this was for several reasons first off it got you around a large portion of the purchase tax that was in force at the time secondly much like a reliant because the car was light enough it could actually be driven on a motorcycle license rather than a car one making it very popular with people who simply couldn't afford or didn't want to get a car license at its peak some 300 gazetta's a week escaped from the british factory which was moved and eventually shut down in 1964. this particular car a four-wheeler was sold in 1959 and purchased by its current owner nick in 2020 as a lockdown project he bought it knewing it required some work but he didn't realize just how much nearly all of the body has been replaced all of the mechanicals have been rebuilt but luckily because these cars were relatively popular and remain so to this day spares are actually quite easy to come by that being said it has taken a lot of man-hours to try and get this right it was originally red but not two-tone as you see it now i have to say this looks absolutely perfect and is how i would want one of these here's also had the interior re-trimmed with his tartan of choice and that i'm told is a somewhat controversial choice but is also much better than the material it had to begin with he has done a number of journeys in the car and his zeta owners i'm told are quite bold with some of them going as far as spain and italy and that's from scotland today a good zetta like this could set you back around forty thousand pounds making it not cheap but cheaper than something like a pl p50 and it is actually a deal more usable than that although let's be honest here anybody buying one of these is not doing so for practical reasons even in the context of the japanese k cars i have driven recently this is relatively slow rather small and very unusual but with luck it should also deliver a driving experience unlike anything else i've ever had let's see so then how to drive a bmw isetta bubble car the controls are in theory all pretty familiar you have clutch brake throttle or where you'd expect them to be they're all quite light and all fairly easy to use the gear lever is to your right where you may not expect it to be but once you think about it that's pretty much the only logical place for it to be you have four gears in a more or less standard h pattern some of the other controls are a little quirkier like the indicators which this little black and red dial over here now i have genuinely only driven this car about sort of 20 yards by the time i started talking to you all so this is a learning experience for me as much as anyone else luckily this is a hill oh yep that's definitely second let's try third which is over there somewhere that's third yep got it got it got traffic behind us no oh this is quite an adventure i apologize that the camera is quite close to me that's because the camera is quite close to me if you haven't worked it out by now the car is tiny right there's a junction down there the car also seemed to want to die quite easily earlier not quite sure why we were driving it and it was fine it only idles at about sort of 300 rpm anyway so it always sounds like it's about to conk out a little bit of throttle required to pull away and we're off and sort of back and kinda towards me i think for a second nope that's not quite there yep now we're in now we're in i'll tell you what [Music] let's go for third which is up there that's there really please don't try and overtake oh you did didn't you you had to you couldn't resist i'm now in fourth cruising speed in this car is about 40 odd mile an hour top speed about 52 i have also been warned that uh left-handers are considerably scarier than right-handers the reason for that being if you imagine for a moment this is a very small car with a very short wheelbase an incredibly narrow track particularly narrow at the back and the engine is on the right and so am i i'm not light neither is the engine that means that when you are in a left-hander there's a lot of weight pushing over there and not a lot trying to keep it in place fortunately visibility all round is as you might imagine excellent because you are sat essentially in a tiny little goldfish bowl it does sound absolutely delightful this little thing if it were a two-stroke i think it would be fairly unpleasant to listen to but it's not and therefore it's not in truth it is reasonably torquey this car's owner nick also happens to have a bentley not entirely unlike the one that i drove last year and he said the technique with this is very similar you essentially don't bother with changing down a gear you work from first second third to fourth and then the idea is that you will come to a stop the car can pull forth from fairly low down because it's geared only for 50 mile an hour anyway so it's not really that much of a concern rear visibility is not excellent you do have a small little rear view mirror up here but what it mostly shows you is the ground behind you i didn't try and adjust it until i realized that where the bodywork is it kind of obscures any cars behind you too i do know that there is a car behind me but happily when you're driving something like this you realize people are probably quite content to follow you open a 30 limit now should i change down again no no i'm not going to change down a gear i'm going to come to a junction fairly soon and i will just stop the brakes are actually quite decent remember this is a 1950s bubble car these are hardly ferrari carbon ceramics but they do bring it to a stop the pedal feel is actually also pretty decent too yeah you can't rush that gear change there is no synchro pretty sure the indicators are also not self-cancelling my favorite control in here is perhaps for the electric wipers which is simply a little switch on the back of the motor which is here in the cabin as you might imagine it's a rather sparse affair in here there is no radio i think there is a basic heater but it could be wrong there is a small little lever for a choke you have a handbrake down here that also works as you would expect it to during the restoration process great attention was paid to trying to keep the car looking as close to original as possible yes the paint scheme is technically incorrect it's a different shade of red than the car came in originally and it wasn't two-tone but they have preserved the seams in the body work where all the different panels meet they have preserved the spot welds many people i'm told are tempted to simply cover those over and make it look a little sleeker a little more futuristic nick wanted to preserve as much of this car's character as he possibly could and it is a car absolutely packed with character it's an utter and total delight to drive this thing [Music] no don't change down dame just resist the urge resist the urge i'm going to change down i couldn't get it done in the bentley yes got it only a small crunch just a small one not going to do it again but it seemed necessary for this bit he flung round this round about when we're doing the driveway is it quite some pace i'm not going to do that lotus elise in green and yellow as a right hand as i can lean in a bit like a motorbike sidecar come on full power that's 20-25 [Music] cooking on gas now 30 better change up yeah the gearbox is actually nowhere near as reluctant as i feared it might be it's actually quite friendly the car is also surprisingly comfortable the steering wheel is touching my belly because it's a large steering wheel and my belly isn't small but the seat i'm told does have a little adjustment though not enough to really make that much difference and in all fairness most old cars of this period at least had a steering wheel that was comically large anyway nowadays of course we've used something like this as basically a novelty but it's really easy to forget that when this came out it was essentially an alternative to not another car but to walking or a horse or a bicycle or potentially motorcycle and sidecar that i think is one reason why in the uk we sold many of the three wheeled variant because it was for the old boys that simply never got a car license and found themselves kind of trapped even as recently as 10 15 years ago when my dad and i were doing silly things with reliant robins we bought a lot of them from old boys who simply never got a car license and that's why they kept driving a robin i do distinctly remember the robins having a reverse gear which nick said to me in the early days at least these weren't allowed to have if they were to qualify as a proper three-wheeler slash motorcycle a lot of people tend to think it was the three-wheel bit that is why reliance classified as a motorbike and that's in fact only part of it the other bit was the weight a reliant rialto is a positively porky 440 kilos this is about 330. steering as you might imagine is a little on the vague side placing the car is actually a little trickier than you might imagine and one of the biggest problems i've had with this is that because it's small and very quiet people do tend to ignore it to a fault many don't seem to realize it's even coming they don't hear it they don't pay attention to it or perhaps they just assume it's a lot further away than it really is no one behind us and you know something i'm doing 35 miles an hour and i'm very happy with that i have the greatest of admiration for people that do serious miles in these i'll have probably done about 10 of them if that in the course of this review and for me that's enough if he said to me hey do you want to borrow the car for a few months drive it all the way back down to england 400 miles no no i do not if i was going to it would be the sort of journey you plan to make sure you don't take in any motorways of any description for any length at all that's just dangerous i now have a vehicle behind it does wash wide quite easily this thing take the racing line through here i've got visibility don't panic about it a little more cautious through here yep got a car coming through round through the tunnel and in ah what a nice little section of road it's something like an aston martin v8 vantage i would be absolutely infuriated particularly as a van is simply pulled out in front of me didn't even see that i was there however in any zeta no business as usual you carry on mate you pull out i really don't mind as long as you don't pull into the side of me that's not an issue there is just one gauge in this car a combined speed and mile counter and since it's rebuild this car has done around 750 of the things that by the way is in a period of only about two or three months which i think is very impressive though it may not have achieved the same success as the mini or the 2cv this i think is still a real cultural icon you park anywhere in one of these and people will go absolutely bananas for it it's a delightful little car with a heart of gold in all i'm told around 330 000 of these were sold across the globe and today in germany and america they still have a very strong following here in britain they are apparently reasonably hard to find they were never really designed to last all that long they were made out of cheap materials by people in an old railway shed in brighton not exactly a byword for quality and durability it does feel like i'm about to fall out that window all right shall we should we go for yeah second you know what i've actually got the knack of the gearbox the bentley never happened drove it for ages this after about 15 minutes nope i've got the gearbox down to a t i feel very confident in it now go for third get a run up with this hill you see now in the downhill section really going to put the pedal to the metal which is not very difficult come on i'll go oh indicators still on don't want that and in fact i need to indicate right to go back to our start location for today come on come on come on there we go oh perfect shift i'm very pleased myself i i will blow my own trumpet with that one very very happy here we go it's a bit springy it's a bit bouncy that rear track by the way is very very narrow because it uses essentially the same setup as a motorbike but with an extra wheel so it's a chain drive on the rear with no differential of any description very basic and that's why it's only that wide when the car is that wide apparently this was the engineering compromise in any case i have had an absolutely delightful time in a bmw isetta and i hope you've enjoyed watching if you want to see more weird whacky and wonderful stuff like this on the channel and you own a car that fits this description or you think it's simply something you'd like to see me review my email address is in the description of every single video and now i'm gonna go and drive something very very different that a 1968 dodge charger rt with a 440 cubic inch engine that's got more inches than this has centimeters looking forward to that one as ever a huge thank you to nick for bringing his car out thanks to you for watching don't forget to hit the like button comment down below subscribe if you haven't already and even if you have make sure you press the bell icon so you're notified of every single new video from me see you for the next one bye-bye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: JayEmm on Cars

Views: 99,866

Keywords: Diary, VLOG, Car, Sound, Test, video, Review, Comparison, JayEmm on Cars

Id: wqeuS8kABBE

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022