Looking as though it might topple over at any moment, the three-wheeled Scootacar was made in Leeds between 1957 and 1964. Few were made and very few survive, so the one in Jeff's collection is quite a rarity...
At school in the 1970s one lad's father would come and collect him in a Scootacar. Definitely quirky. I always yearned for a Messerschmitt KR200, but beyond my very limited budget.
I wanted a 'schmitt too, but there were very few affordable ones in useable condition by 1975 when I was old enough to drive. My first car was a Bond MkG. I got that for free. It cost under £30 to put an MOT on it.
Friends of my parents had a Scootacar as a second car. The husband mainly used it to drive to work because it was cheap to run and easy to park. Eventually their son got old enough to drive. He started driving it on his own on L plates, but eventually he was stopped by the police for driving unaccompanied. The family had always treated it as a single seater as they were all fairly large. Subsequently the son had to drive it accompanied by one of his parents. I can still picture him filling the front of the car with his mum uncomfortably jammed in the back!
I thought it was going to be a Rytecraft Scootacar from the 1930s. One of those was actually driven around the world in the 1960s (its in the Brooklands Museum). Cars like the Hunslet Scootacar were really killed off by a change in the legislation which required a full driving licence, rather than just a motorcycle one.
I remember reading about that, when the guy who drove it around the world died a few years ago. There's a great pic of him on a Japanese highway, I seem to recall, dwarfed by the traffic around him.
Yes - it's one of many oddities in the collection. I could spend a year there, just working through everything. Virtually all of it is Below The Radar!
