The point is not to look cool it's to get somewhere.

The point is not to look cool, it’s to get somewhere.

Jeremy Clarkson, the guy from the British show Top Gear, has designed and now driven the world’s tiniest car. It looks more like a fifth grader’s Halloween R2D2 costume, but it really is a car (or, as Clarkson put it, “I promise it’s a real car”). It has a two-stroke 100cc engine. He takes it on the A3, which is a very big road, and although he lives to tell the tale, he does so kind of by the skin of his teeth, and there’s not a lot of dignity involved.

Certainly this tiny car, which Clarkson has no plans to manufacture, solves some of the problems of larger cars — like having to put in a lot of gas, or having to get out of the car to fuel up. But given that it is more or less incapable of going over bumps, if you take it on the highway you feel like you’re going to die, and you have to wear a silly helmet, you might as well ride a bike.