I don’t know what’s going on in your life right now, or what challenges you may be facing, but I know goals can sometimes seem impossible, and one’s situation can seem intractable and doomed to never change. If that’s the case, I’d like to show you something that I hope will inspire you, something that I sincerely hope you can look upon and think, “hell, if that could be done, I can do what I need to do!” That thing is the Iso Autocarro, or, as it’s better known, the Isetta Truck.
I know most of us know of Isettas as BMW products. And, yes, while BMW certainly built the most Isettas, and the little watermelon-shaped car was in no small way responsible for BMW’s survival, the Isetta was not originally their idea.
The Isetta was originally from the Italian company Iso, better known for their impressive, muscular sports cars like the Rivolta or the Grifo. But after WWII, they needed cheap, useful cars, too, which is how the Isetta was born.
That’s a whole other story, though. We’re here to talk about trucks.
Isetta of Great Britain did make an Isetta pickup truck based on the BMW version, in pretty limited numbers, and it looked like this:
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That’s pretty much what most people would think of when you say “Isetta truck”—something tiny, questionably useful, and unquestionably adorable and hilarious.
Iso, on the other hand, was not fucking around. Their Isetta-based trucks looked like this:
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Iso called these the Iso Autocarro, and these were absolutely not little toy pretend trucks. I mean, sure, they had tiny one-cylinder, two-piston (!) engines displacing 236cc and making 9.5 horsepower, probably what a modern F-150’s A/C compressor requires to run at full blast, but they also had full-width rear axles and a beefy tube-frame rear that allowed these tiny brutes to haul over 1,100 pounds!
That’s how much the “5 Quintali” referenced in this old ad is:
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That’s over a thousand pounds! That’s no joke. These things did real work.
The Iso Autocarros came in a variety of configurations, including enclosed trucks, flatbeds, and even tilt-bed trucks. It’s thought that as many as 4,000 Autocarros were built between 1954 and 1958.
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Look how lovely the engine access area looks in the wooden bed of this 1957 Autocarro, a licensed Spanish-built one from España Iso, part of the old Bruce Wiener Microcar Museum. Damn, that’s a satisfying image right there.
Hardly any of these are left, as they were considered disposable workhorses for the most part, but a few survive, even some interesting modified ones like this strangely lovely Iso Camper one-off:
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…or this wine-cask-holding variant:
I suppose the Piaggio Ape took over this role after the Isetta, at least in Italy, and it’s become an icon itself.
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So, just remember, real, genuine, used-for-actual-work trucks were made from goofy little refrigerator-door’d Isettas. If that’s a thing that can exist, then I’m sure whatever goals you have are equally achievable.
Just let the Autocarro be your spirit guide.
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