As cars get bigger, heavier and harder to use, this fashionable city slicker is a breath of fresh air
On a purely subjective basis, the Microlino might not be my favourite car of the year – if you’ll permit me to stretch the oxymoronic to the point of… well, maybe just moronic.
This quirky runaround, this Isetta reincarnate, is a good laugh – obviously, look at it – but it’s not the most fun car I’ve driven this year. Nor is it the most practical, efficient, sensible, capacious, comfortable, safe, well equipped or dynamic. And it’s very, very far from being the quickest.
But these days, I find myself increasingly drawn to those cars that are most contextually relevant – and not just personally, but societally. Okay, yes, I live in south London, drive a maximum of 40 miles in an average week and don’t have kids or a dog, so the Microlino would actually suit me down to the ground, to be honest.
Zoom out, though, and you might join me at the conclusion that this faintly comical two-seater is not far off the exact type of vehicle we should be building and using in 2024. Well, those of us who can, at least.
The cars we’re forced to drive and buy are becoming ever more bloated, over-digitised, controversially (or forgettably) styled, uncontrollably quick and fiscally unobtainable. They are resource intensive, faddish and purposely disposable, designed to be à la mode for a maximum of a decade before being swapped for something that does the same thing for a few grand more.
The Microlino (for better or worse) flies in the face of those conventions – most of them, at least – in its positioning as a functional and relatively basic commuter car that’s specced to about the bare minimum while also retaining some level of aspirational quality. It’s not got any technology to go out of date, it weighs as much as a couple of big motorbikes, it’s got all the battery capacity it’ll ever need and it’s perfectly sized for the environments in which it’s destined to be most often driven – which is more than can be said for the vast majority of EVs I drove in 2024.
It’s nice to drive too: quiet, smooth, not quick but sufficiently perky and nimble enough to navigate the multi-storey at Westfield, if a touch unnervingly unstable with it. And slow.
Most of all, it’s got universal kerb appeal and a sense of humour – attributes you’d be hard-pressed to attach to the likes of the Dacia Spring and Leapmotor T03. You smile while you drive it, and the whole world smiles with you – kids at bus stops, lorry drivers, tourists and haggard commuters united in their visible appreciation of a car that seeks to delight as much as convey.
I don’t want to disingenuously paint it as the very saviour of global automotive, of course. This is still very much a fashion-first and relatively rudimentary runaround – only really superior to a moped by virtue of its roof and seatbelts – and you can bet you won’t see many of them, but if the mainstream marques were to approach the thorny subject of urban mobility with such irreverence, the collective disillusionment towards modern motoring might just subside.
Sure, for the best part of £20,000 you could take your pick from any number of roomier petrol hatchbacks, and there’s even a growing number of ‘full-sized’ electric cars available for not much more money. Not to mention the dazzling array of bigger, brainier and all-round better alternatives you could pick up second-hand, but do you lift the whole front end off to get in them? Could you park them end on in a bay space? Could you take the entire sound system with you – in one hand – when you get out of the car?
So there we go: my favourite car of 2024 was probably the worst I drove all year – but, even in the context of all the gleaming exotica I drove over the past 12 months, it’s the one I’d spend my money on.