This 18HP Sports Car Is More Fun Than Some Sports Cars With Twice The Power

Yes, math wizards, I stand by that headline. This little, 600something-pound, two-cylinder sports car making all of 18 horsepower is easily – easily!– more fun than so many other sports cars, including ones that can field twice the power of this one. Yes, it’s more fun than a 36 hp sports car! Hell, let’s say it’s even more fun than a sports car with three times the power! Yes, I’m saying it now: this 1958 Berkeley SE328 is more fun than a hypothetical sports car with an unheard of 54 horsepower! That’d be like, what, a Karmann-Ghia or something?

Okay, Mayne a Ghia or an old 356 would be as much fun. Fine. Whatever. But the point is that the Berkeley SE328 is a charming little machine, and there’s one that our Autopian co-founder Beau owns that he may choose to put up for auction. And I have feelings about that.

We’ve actually talked about this car a good bit before: it was the first car I ever got to bid on and win at auction, thanks to Beau’s generosity with letting me have the joy and thrill of bidding on a car. It was pretty damn exciting; I see why people get so into this:

And, later, I got to drive it around a lot to do a full video about it, which is where I really fell in love with the little citrusy thing; also, yes, we borrowed a good bit of footage from this video for the newer one up top, but you know how that goes. Why let good footage go to waste?

These are really appealing little cars, one of the very few microcars designed not for austerity and perfidy and basic transportation needs, but for fun. Affordable, achievable fun for people for whom an MG or Austin-Healey Sprite was just too much car for too much money.

As I wrote of the Berkeley’s origins in that earlier article:

“Berkeley was primarily a maker of fiberglass caravans – what we in America call campers or camping trailers – but that was a seasonal business, so the company was looking for something to sell when camper sales were slow. That’s why when Berkeley was approached by designer Lawrence Bond, the guy who had made the Bond Minicar, about designing a low-cost, fun sports car that could be “something good enough to win World 750cc races,” the team was willing to give it a go.”

What I really love about the Berkeley is that, for a while at least, it was the cheapest sports car one could buy, and I find that sort of superlative impressive. And I’m even more impressed with how the car doesn’t feel like some budget compromise, at least when you get past its diminutive size.

In styling and driving feel and just overall tone and character, the Berkely feels like what it was intended to be: fun. It’s a blast to drive, and do you think someone in a more expensive roadster is really having all that much more fun than you are having in your Berkeley? My gut says no, no they’re not.

The Berkeley feels like a great democratizer of sports cars, in a way. It brings open-topped British roadster joy to the people, like Promethus brought fire to humankind, just with more two-stroke smoke.

So now Beau may be putting the Berkeley up for auction. And I get why, it may be time for someone else to get some happiness from this cheery little thing, I’m just fond of the car and liked knowing it was somewhere where I could have access to it, if I really wanted to. But that’s me being selfish.

I remember when we had this thing sitting in a booth at the LA Auto Show, and I remember just how many people stopped to look at it, to take pictures of it, to let their kids crawl inside it, and how happy it made them. Sure, most of the exhaust of this car is unburnt fuel and oil from that dirty two-stroke inline-twin, but at least a decent percentage of the emissions of this car must be raw, uncut joy. People smile when they see the car, when they drive it, when they hear it, everything. It’s mechanically-produced levity, wrapped in fiberglass, and I hope it’ll end up with someone who can really appreciate that.