Why BMW Needed a Car It Didn’t Even Design
By the early 1950s, BMW’s own products were failing it. The expensive 501 sedan sold poorly, much of its pre-war factory capacity sat inside newly Communist East Germany and the company came close enough to collapse that rival Daimler-Benz reportedly considered a takeover by the end of the decade. Rather than engineer a cheap car from scratch, BMW licensed the design outright from Italian manufacturer Iso, which had already built it as the Isetta since 1953. BMW reworked the mechanicals, dropped in a 245cc single-cylinder motorcycle engine borrowed from its own R25/3 bike and launched its version in March 1955 at 2,550 Deutschmarks, cheaper than a Volkswagen Beetle and competitive with other German microcars of the time.