1957 King Midget Model III

The King Midget story reminds us what a middle-class nation the U.S. was in the '50s. Claud Dry and Dale Orcutt, of Athens, Ohio, buddies from the Civil Air Patrol, wanted to sell bare-boned utility car that anybody could afford, unlike that bloody elitist peacenik Henry Ford with his fancy Model T. King Midget's cars made the Model T look like a Bugatti Royale. In the late 1940s, they began offering the single-seat Model I as a home-built, $500 kit, containing the frame, axles and sheetmetal patterns, so that the body panels could be fabricated by local tradesmen. Any single-cylinder engine would power it. The result was a truly crap-tastic little vehicle, the four-wheel equivalent to those Briggs-and-Stratton powered minibikes. Amazingly, Midget Motors continued to develop and sell mini-cars until the late 1960s. The crown jewel was the Model III, introduced in 1957, a little folded-steel crackerbox powered by a 9-hp motor. Government safety standards, at long last, put the King Midget out of our misery.

1956 Renault Dauphine

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The most ineffective bit of French engineering since the Maginot Line, the Renault Dauphine was originally to be named the Corvette, tres ironie. It was, in fact, a rickety, paper-thin scandal of a car that, if you stood beside it, you could actually hear rusting. Its most salient feature was its slowness, a rate of acceleration you could measure with a calendar. It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment. The fact that the ultra-cheap, super-sketchy Dauphine sold over 2 million copies around the world is an index of how desperately people wanted cars. Any cars.