The Horrors Of War Led To Germany Building Cars With Doors Like Refrigerators

There’s never just one right way to do things. I know this is something that most of us have long understood, but sometimes it’s easy to forget, as we can tend to fall into ruts of doing things one particular way. The way we think of cars can be like this. There’s certain establish solutions to the problems cars aim to solve, and once we find solutions that work, we tend to repeat those solutions, over and over. But what happens when circumstances force you to think in new ways? That’s when interesting things happen.

The cars I want to talk about today absolutely found other ways to solve their problems. In the case of these cars, the problem was how to be a family car. Now, by “family car” I mean something pretty specific: how to seat four people in a vehicle with a bit of room for luggage, and allow for each group of two – usually divided between parents and children – to have their own door.

I know there have been plenty of cars that were used as family cars that didn’t exactly meet these requirements – the Volkswagen Beetle, for example, was used as a family car by millions (my own family included), but if you wanted to let the kids out of the back seat, someone up front had to get out and flip the seat forward. The two cars I’m discussing now – the BMW 600 and the Zündapp Janus – did not have this restriction, and they were even smaller than the Beetle.

Before I get too deep into these microcar weeds, I should remind you that I’m talking about these cars because our Autopian co-Founder Beau has them, and is considering selling one or both of them. That’s right! It’s an other episode of Should I Sell It?

Both of these cars are from postwar Germany, right at about the time when the economy was just starting to pick up again in the later 1950s, but definitely not prosperous, at least not yet. There was still a demand for simple, cheap transportation, especially cars that could hold a family of four, at prices below even that of the ubiquitous Beetle.

The constraints of the economy pushed carmakers to try novel design approaches, ones that didn’t even really feel like cars, as they are generally understood. BMW, for example, found itself after the war with a lineup of luxurious vehicles that precisely nobody was buying. They needed something dirt cheap to make and sell, used as little fuel as possible, yet was still somehow usable. They found their answer in an Italian company that used to make refrigerators: Iso.

Iso was once Isothermos, the maker of fridges, and the car the company came up with to meet Italy’s postwar trasport demand seemed like a fridge itself, with one big front-opening door. The fridge wasn’t the actual inspiration for this design – it just made sense from an economic standpoint, as it was one door that exposed both seats instead of requiring two – but it was a funny coincidence.

The resulting car was unlike anything really seen before: an egg with a front door, enclosing a bench ahead of a small engine, all propped on four wheels, the rear ones set quite close together. The odd layout worked, and BMW took notice of the car, and the company ended up licensing the body design from Iso, buying the tooling, and then made their own modifications, including adapting one of BMW’s more powerful motorcycle engines for the car.

The resulting BMW Isetta proved to be a hit, and was just what the company needed: a car they could actually sell. Eventually, BMW refined the design into a bigger, somewhat up-market family car, the 600, which now featured two rows of seats, and a door for each row:

The BMW 600 was a packaging marvel, and in many ways can be considered the ideal minimal expression of a four-seater car. It’s smaller than a BMC Mini, but easier for the four passengers to get in and out of, and surprisingly roomy inside.

The rear-mounted flat-twin BMW motorcycle engine made about 20 hp, pretty good for the scale of the car and the era, and while the 600 was a very clever, if quirky design, the market in Germany was tending to want less quirkiness, as the slow recovery after the war was allowing for more traditionally-designed sorts of cars.

But that’s boring! And not every carmaker got pressured out of making weird cars. Some leaned into it, hard, like motorcycle maker Zündapp.

Zündapp never built cars before – and never would again – but the Janus was worth making an exception for. In 1954, Zündapp decided they needed to branch out into more weather-protected vehicles, which meant a car instead of a motorcycle. Zündapp reached out to aircraft maker Dornier, who had built a prototype car called the Delta, a strange little trapezoid of a car that featured upward-opening hatches at both ends.

The Delta was a genuinely novel design: engine in the middle, seats at either end, facing in opposite directions. It was unexpected, but really sort of brilliant, offering a surprising amount of room for people in a remarkably minimal envelope. Zündapp took the concept and refined it a bit, making the side doors side-opening and making the styling a bit less alien-shed-looking:

The odd layout remained the same: an engine in the very middle (a 245cc one-cylinder two-stroke making 14 hp and unique to the car) driving the rear wheels, some luggage space in the middle above and beside the engine (and fuel tank) and two bench seats, one facing forward, one aft.

The Janus was really like two Isettas mounted back-to-back and while it did look sort of strange, I think Zündapp’s designers did a good job of keeping it from looking that strange.

The amazing thing about the Janus is just how roomy it is inside; look at that diagram up there and you can see that there’s a surprising amount of legroom. It feels open and roomy inside, car more so than its exterior dimensions would suggest.

It’s a really clever out-of-the-box solution to the four-seat/a door for everyone family car problem, and in some ways I think it’s a shame the layout never caught on. I guess people like an easier way to talk to one another in different rows? You’d think that separation could be a plus.

Interestingly, when Dick Teague was first designing the AMC Pacer, one of his first ideas was to make something a lot like a ’70s-era Janus. Early sketches, like that one above, show a mid-mounted Wankel rotary engine and seats facing front and rear! The Pacer is already delightfully odd, but this would have been next-level. Some customizer really should make this sketch a reality.

These are both remarkable and clever cars, brilliant and offbeat solutions to the family car problem. I wish Beau could keep both, but I know how reality can be a jerk sometimes. So, what should he do? Sell both? Keep both? Keep one or the other? Let’s hear what you think!