Five Things: the tallest and lowest
Monday, 20 April 2020
Every Monday we here at Stuff Motoring like to kick off the week with Five Things, a look at five car-related things that have amused, intrigued or interested us recently.
While trucks, SUVs, utes and vans are the towering behemoths of the road, some cars have done their best to keep up, while others have gone in the opposite direction. So this week we take a look at five of the tallest and lowest cars ever made.
Current tallest: Daihatsu Wake
The tallest car currently in production is, strangely enough, from one of the smallest segments on the planet - the Japanese Kei car class!
While the width, length and engine capacity of the Kei class are tightly kept to the diminutive side of things, height is a bit more generous, with a maximum of 2,000mm allowed. Which would make for an extremely oddly-proportioned car if someone were to build a car to the maximum dimensions allowed.
Daihatsu is currently the manufacturer that pushes that to the max, with the Wake (also sold as the Toyota Pixis Mega), that packs a towering height of 1,835mm, or 20mm taller than a Ford Ranger. And, yes, it does make for an extremely oddly-proportioned car…
Tallest ever: Fiat 60hp
Seen in a picture by itself the Fiat 60hp mightn't seem all that tall, but that is simply because it was freakin' massive in every way.
Put it this way, at 2,550mm tall it is only 74mm lower than a high-roof Volkswagen Crafter van, which is a very large thing indeed.
The 60hp was powered by some equally massive engines too - a 10.5-litre inline four-cylinder and an 11.0-litre inline six. It was built between 1904 and 1906 as was very popular with wealthy American socialites at the time. As long as they had the space to park it, we suppose…
Current lowest: Catherham Seven
It is probably not surprising that a car derived from the original Lotus Seven is the lowest car you can currently buy.
The more heavily modified, seriously demented versions of Catherham's standard Super Seven are the lowest, with the maddest being Seven 620R that can rocket to100kmh in just fractionally over 3 seconds when equipped with its most powerful engine option - a 230kW supercharged 2.0-litre Ford Duratec.
The 1,015mm tall (that's 40 inches, or half an inch lower than a Ford GT40, which was actually 40.5 inches tall…) Caterham weighs just 610kg, meaning that 230kW is a terrifying amount of power, particularly in something you can literally drag your knuckles along the road when you are sitting in it…
Lowest ever: Lotus Eleven
Appropriately, one of the few cars lower than a Colin Chapman-designed car is… another Colin Chapman-designed car.
While the Lotus Eleven was designed as a racing car, they were (and still are) perfectly road legal, and many of them proudly wear number plates to this day.
At just 810mm high (for the version without the headrest), the Eleven makes the Caterham look like the Fiat 60hp, weighing as little as 412kg (depending on the engine and other things) and was generally fitted with an 1,100cc Coventry Climax engine, although Ford, Maserati, DKW and Saab engines were also used.
Even lower: Probe 15
There is a car that went even wildly lower than the Lotus Eleven, although it was a one-off hand-built model that was never mass produced.
The single Probe 15 prototype was said to be just 736mm tall and didn't need doors, because you simply climbed into it through a hatch in the roof.
It morphed into the Probe 16 (pictured here) that was marginally taller than the Lotus Eleven at 860mm, but did get a very limited production run, with the first one being bought by legendary bassist for the band Cream, Jack Bruce.
While the Probe may have looked like a supercar, it was only powered by the 1.8-litre B-series BMC engine used in the Morris Marina. It was modified, but still…