For a certain editor In 1952 BMW in West Germany produced its first car since before the Second World War The 501 competed with and failed in terms of performance price and engineering excellence to match the middle range sedans made by Mercedes Benz The 502 was a still more dismal failure In the years that followed BMW made every mistake in the book They launched expensive new luxury models with temperamental high performance engines in a country that had not yet recovered its prewar confidence They suffered huge losses panicked and attempted to escape downmarket by making bubble cars under licence for an Italian company Isetta These cars had some success in post imperial Britain where there was no Marshall Plan and the Suez Crisis brought on the first of many oil shocks But Germany in the late 1950s was enjoying the fruits of Wirtschaftswunder The country that had been in ruins only ten years earlier was no longer poor enough for the BMW Isetta Motor Coup known colloquially but never popularly as the egg Extract from Car Wars Fifty Years of Greed Treachery and Skulduggery in the Global Marketplace by Jonathan Mantle But then there was a fuel crisis and so briefly the Germans bought it What a happy happy accident The BMW Isetta Despite its reputation for automotive elegance and craftsmanship BMW laid a multimillion dollar egg in the 1950s with its Isetta minicar sneeringly dubbed das rollende Ei or the rolling egg The Isetta s engine was in the rear passengers exited and entered through the nose of the car as if it were a D Day troop carrier In fact when the front door swung open the steering column and dashboard came with it As for safety the entire vehicle front to back was one big crumple zone Steering the Isetta was difficult largely because its body was tapered towards the rear like a wedge of Emmenthaler cheese Most models had only three wheels which didn t make the car any easier to control But the design enabled the manufacturers to have the Isetta officially classified a motorcycle and thus taxed at cheaper rates Extract from What Were They Thinking Really Bad Ideas Throughout History by Bruce Felton