Dreaming is allowed
Daihatsu is bringing back an equally small and practical city racer that you may never have heard of: the Midget. With a show car called Midget X, Daihatsu is looking ahead to this new small city friend.
Although Daihatsu has delivered cars like the Charade, Valera and Applause in the Netherlands, it is mainly known for its really small city cars. In the past, the Cuore managed to entice over 65,000 Dutch people to purchase, and even the Move managed to extract wallets from thousands of people’s pockets. In its home country Japan, it could get even smaller than the Cuore. For example, from the late 1950s, it sold the Midget: a three-wheeler with an open loading bed and a handlebar like you know from a scooter. The original Midget later got a variant with doors and an actual steering wheel. In the mid-1990s, Daihatsu introduced the Midget II: a tiny car with four wheels, rear-wheel drive and a three-cylinder engine with about 30 hp. The last examples of that tiny practical city friend rolled off the production line in Osaka in 2001, which means there hasn’t been a Midget for almost 25 years. Why this long introduction? Well: the Midget is returning!
Daihatsu is bringing a concept car called Midget X to the Japan Mobility Show. The Midget X looks out at the world just as innocently as its predecessors, has tiny wheels and should be just as multi-purpose as the earlier models. Daihatsu envisions versions with a small open loading bed, but also with a storage box or even a real cabin at the rear. Technical specifications are not yet available, although we dare say with near certainty that it is probably electrically powered. If a production version comes, it will speed straight past the European and thus also the Dutch market.