Three-wheeled cars are perhaps the ultimate motoring oddity, but they’ve been around for longer than the motorcar as we know it. To this day, they’re as much a consideration in the question of the future of personal mobility as they were more than 250 years ago, with numerous companies investigating and experimenting with the often smaller, cheaper format.
We’ve been flirting with the idea of the three-wheeled personal carriage since the mid-1700s and, you never know, we could all be silently humming around our cities in three-wheeled EV serenity in the near- to mid-future. On this basis, the three-wheeled personal vehicle is one of the most enduring mobility concepts to use wheels rather than legs.
The World’s First Self-Propelled Land Vehicle
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s Fardier à vapeur of 1769, was the world’s first self-propelled land vehicle, before trains, bicycles or cars were ever a thing. Think about that the next time you snigger as a Reliant Robin splutters past.
The romantic French name translates literally to steam cart, and it was designed to carry various military armaments. It weighed 2.5 tonnes unladen, and could allegedly carry four passengers. That’s similar to a modern super SUV, although they’re capable of a bit more than the real-world 2.5mph top speed.
Reports were of a cumbersome, slow and inconvenient machine. The boiler, which hung out beyond the front wheel, did more to upset the vehicle’s balance than it did to actually power it, and it had 15-minute fire-lighting intervals.
The French military, while impressed enough with the engineering to stick it in a museum, didn’t deem it suitable for service. Even horses didn’t need to stop every 15 minutes for a feed. Numerous other innovators attempted to pick up the baton over the years. George A. Long, Jules-Albert de Dion (otherwise known as the winner of the world’s first motor race), Léon Serpollet and more followed Cugnot’s lead with steam tricycles, albeit over a century later.
The Early Days of Motoring
Carl Benz’s three-wheeled Patent-Motorwagen really got things moving. With two wheels in the rear and one up front, it was powered by a 1.0-litre single-cylinder engine in the back with two-thirds of a horsepower. It was also fuelled by a strange sub-material derived from petrol called Legroin. It is still regarded as the world’s first practical automobile, with 25 making their way to customers. Perhaps that was because of what seems like a relatively accessible price. In 1886, it cost 600 Imperial German Marks, or very roughly £4,000 today. Have that, Dacia.
Bertha Benz even took one for what is considered to be the first long-distance journey by automobile, covering 66 miles with her two teenage sons, from Mannheim to Pforzheim. It sounds like a conventional family road trip to us, but some 140 years ago, she was making history.
Three wheels turned to four in conventional cars, as the three-wheeled Patent-Motorwagen was succeeded by the four-wheeled Velo. The rest is history, with three-wheelers subsequently relegated to left-field curiosities.
However, the Morgan Three-Wheeler – arguably the longest-enduring three-wheeled car – was close to mass production in its early years. It’s been around in various forms since 1909, when H.F.S Morgan built himself a three-wheeled runaround. A year later, he began selling them and, within three years, production was into four figures. The motorbike-engined V-Twin cars lasted until just before World War II, though a Three-Wheeler aping the originals – V-Twin engine and all – returned in 2012 for a nine-year run. It was one of the modern Morgan car company’s most popular models, so it’s no surprise there’s now a replacement.
Microcars
After WWII came microcars. These were the smallest, cheapest, simplest cars around, devised for a continent low on resources and a need for personal transportation. With their tiny engines, limited practicality and lowly performance, microcars were short-lived as a serious mainstream mobility solution.
The most famous examples of three-wheeled post-war microcars are probably the BMW Isetta (pictured above) and the Peel P50, though the Allard Clipper, the Fuldamobil, the Heinkel, the Daihatsu Bee, the Messerschmitt KR200, the Attica 200, the Alta A200 and even the Soviet-built SMZ S-1L count among their ranks. They had varying degrees of success; Allard built just 20 Clippers, while more than 2,000 Fuldamobils were made.
Latter-Day Microcars and Fumbled Future Mobility
The Reliant Robin and Rialto were microcars of sorts, though well after the trope’s heyday. Of course, Trotters Independent Trading cemented what has to be the most famous three-wheeler ever made into UK pop culture. The likes of the Bond Bug and even the CityEI in the 1990s, attempted to keep the concept alive. Then, of course, there’s the Sinclair C5 (pictured above), a tiny electric-powered machine that was about as ‘80s as a dodgy perm and just as practical.
The C5 could have been a three-wheeler before its time, along with many others, such as the Corbin Sparrow – a 1999 attempt at electric urban mobility. The Carver One was similar – a three-wheeler that combined the excitement of a leaning bike (using its clever dynamic vehicle control system) with the solidity and dependability of a rear-axle and the comfort and practicality of a closed cockpit. Elio’s P5 claimed it could change the way we think about mobility in 2015, but it never saw production.
Three-Wheeled Concepts
Lopping off a wheel is a great way to get some attention for your concept car, as many a mainstream manufacturer did over the years. Ford with the Ghia Cockpit and General Motors with the Lean Machine were joined by Toyota with the iRoad, Mercedes-Benz with the F300 Life Jet, VW with the GX3 and Peugeot with the 20Cup. Then there were the entirely barmy Honda XXX and 3R-C concepts. All were attempts at either redefining the sports car or the economy car, but none were taken particularly seriously by the public or by their creators.
Three-Wheelers You Can Buy Today
You can buy some three-wheelers now, and some are still looking to the future. The difference today is that the world really seems to be changing, with cities getting smoggier and more cramped, the time of the all-electric three-wheeled runaround could be nigh.
Polaris Slingshot
The Slingshot is quite famous as three-wheeled cars go, probably because it looks like Lamborghini’s attempt at a Morgan Three-Wheeler rival. It’s a striking and sporty little thing, available with a 203hp four-cylinder engine sending power to the rear wheel either via a five-speed manual or a five-speed paddle-shift transmission. Launched in 2015, the Slingshot has been a relative success, perhaps due to its low cost, with prices ranging from $20,000 to $35,000. Happily, a canopy-style top called the ‘Slingshade’ is an option.
Campagna T-Rex
The Campagna T-Rex is a lot like the Slingshot, but it’s been around since 1988. Today’s T-Rex RR has 208hp thanks to its 1.4-litre Kawasaki superbike engine, which powers the rear wheel via a six-speed sequential box and weighs just 498kg. Essentially a trike with car aero, this thing can deliver serious performance and thrills. There’s even an optional travel package that adds 92 litres of storage, for longer road trips. Sounds like a riot, but at $66,000, it’s pricey.
Morgan Super 3
Probably the most famous three-wheeled car you can buy today is the British Morgan 3 Wheeler, born again for 2022 as the Super 3. Binning the air-cooled V-twin in favour of a water-cooled 120hp Ford three-cylinder, it also uses an all-new platform and its styling has been dramatically updated, but it’s lost very little of its essential character. It’s still basically a bathtub, just a bit more sculpted, with special attention paid to how the air moves over and through it, and it still uses the lovely old Mazda five-speed gearbox. In a performance car marketplace that puts the driver ever further from the raw sensations of driving, the Super 3 remains a breath of fresh air and, for £41,955, it’s a bit of a bargain.
Electrameccanica Solo
The smallest cars on the market are a dying breed, so reinvention is needed. That’s what Canadian outfit Electrameccanica reckons, and what it’s addressed with its Solo, a single-seater three-wheeled electric car that pairs a fairly conventional nose and a closed cockpit, with bodywork that tapers to a single-wheel rear end. It has a 100-mile range, will hit 80mph and is reminiscent of fun, small French cars of the 1990s, such as the Peugeot 106. It could be priced similarly too, with a projected figure of just £15,000. The company came all the way to Goodwood earlier this year to test the waters, and received dozens of orders from London businesses. Maybe the three-wheeled mobility revolution is finally here…