Hasta La Ideas

Many American cities have this problem, but it’s most obvious in sprawling Los Angeles: When you’re trapped in bumper-to-bumper on the 405, you look around and observe the brutal 1:1 ratio of cars to drivers, as far as the eye can see. The absurdity of lone humans each ensconced in their own two-ton rectangle of steel, and the space each person’s vehicle consumes relative to the drivers’ size, is difficult to find unremarkable. Four wheels, one driver, and from one to five empty seats.

That’s how it’s turned out, but in the 1950s German engineer Carl Jurisch had a different vision. According to the Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum, Jurisch “became convinced that the future of transportation lay in a personal single-seat vehicle” and so, using a motorcycle sidecar as his starting point, he designed his single-occupancy Motoplan.

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