The Cyclecar: The Motorcycle-Car That Almost Changed Everything
In my post about Detroit Electric, I mentioned spotting “CycleCar” in a 1914 newspaper alongside other early automobile manufacturers. The cyclecar was its own fascinating chapter in automotive history — a scrappy, lightweight alternative to the automobile that boomed and bust within a single decade.
What Was a Cyclecar?
A cyclecar was a small, lightweight, and inexpensive motorized vehicle produced between roughly 1910 and the early 1920s. Think of it as a cross between a motorcycle and a car — typically powered by a single-cylinder or V-twin engine, often air-cooled, sometimes borrowed directly from motorcycles. They were stripped-down, spartan machines built for people who couldn’t afford a full automobile.
The idea was simple: give everyday people affordable personal transportation. For a brief moment, cyclecar enthusiasts believed they had cracked the code.
The Boom
The numbers tell the story of how fast the craze took off. In 1911, there were fewer than a dozen cyclecar manufacturers in both the UK and France. By 1914, there were over 100 manufacturers in each country, plus others across Germany, Austria, and the United States.
American manufacturers jumped in quickly. Notable US makers included:
- Twombly Car Corporation (New York City) — founded by W. Irving Twombly in 1913, who also served as a director of the Cyclecar Manufacturers National Association
- American Cyclecar Company
- Arrow (Dayton, Ohio, 1914)
- Asheville Light Car (North Carolina, 1914–1915)
- Auto-Ette Company (Illinois, 1913)
The Cyclecar Manufacturers National Association itself was an indicator of how seriously the industry took the movement — these weren’t backyard tinkerers, they were organized businesses trying to establish a new vehicle category.
The Bust
The decline came fast and it came from one direction: the Ford Model T.
Ford’s ability to mass-produce and continuously lower prices made the cyclecar’s main selling point — affordability — irrelevant. If you could get a real car for nearly the same price, why buy a stripped-down contraption with motorcycle parts?
By the early 1920s, the cyclecar era was effectively over in the United States.
In Europe the story lasted a bit longer. The British manufacturer GN made around 4,000 cars before ceasing production. Bédélia ran from 1910 to 1925. Morgan, the most famous survivor, started in 1910 and — remarkably — still builds three-wheelers today.
See One in Person
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has a 1914 Twombly cyclecar in its collection, one of the few surviving American examples:
Find Period Advertisements
The Library of Congress’s Chronicling America archive has digitized millions of newspaper pages from this era. You can search for cyclecar advertisements and news coverage from 1910–1920 directly:
- Search Chronicling America — search “cyclecar” with date range 1912–1916 to find period ads and articles
The cyclecar’s window was short — less than ten years from boom to bust — but it represented a genuine attempt to democratize the automobile before Ford beat everyone to it with sheer industrial scale.