By Roger Boylan

I’ve always liked small cars, and indeed owe whatever abilities I have behind the wheel to the tough apprenticeship I served with the quirky minicars of my European youth: the Mini itself, as well as sundry Simcas, Fiats, Peugeots, and Renaults. But that was longer ago than I care to remember, and it’s a measure of how much small cars have changed since then that the Yaris, Toyota’s base econocar model, boasts—at least in its “S” iteration–more luxuries than were once available on Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, never mind on your average Simca or Renault. Not that we think of such features as luxuries these days; they’re just the safety and comfort devices we’ve come to expect, spoiled brats that we are. But the 1966 Simca 1000 I learned to drive on was, essentially, nothing but a chassis, an engine (rear-mounted), and a passenger cabin with elementary accommodations. No airbags, no seat belts, no ABS, no stability control, no traction control, no headrests, no crumple zones, no GPS, no radio–although later on I taped a tiny Sony transistor to the dashboard–and no glove compartment, just a shelf for maps, cigarettes, and bandages. But it did have a rigid (non-telescoping) steering column to efficiently impale the driver in the event of a collision, a sharp-edged dashboard that could slice you in two if you hit it at the right angle, coat hooks above the passenger windows ideally placed for gouging eyes from heads flung sideways in crosswinds, and hideous gray-and-red vinyl seats that always smelled of cod liver oil, especially on hot summer days when the only air conditioning came through the half-open passenger window. God, I loved that car. Because what it had most of all was Personality.

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