1973 ACOMA MINI COMTESSE 730

The Mini Comtesse was Acoma’s first entry into the microcar world, but certainly not their last, as they saw significant success selling microcars. This car was in a class called ‘sans permis’, or ‘without permit’, meaning that no sort of license or registration was needed to drive the cars on the road.  

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After regulations becoming tighter on this class by the ‘60s, the Mini Comtesse was the first vehicle to be produced conforming to all of the new regulations. The regulations were intended to imply that only mopeds could be in the sans permis class, with stipulations such as: engine displacement of 50cc or less, no manual transmission, max legal speed of 45 km/h, and must have a way to manually propel the vehicle (i.e. bicycle pedals). The thought was that surely no one would make a car with these traits, and if they did, surely no one would buy it...or would they? Acoma made sure that the Mini Comtesse complied with all of this, including the use of an extra deployable pedal that could be flipped down next to the brake pedal, which was connected to a ratcheting chain drive, driving a sprocket at the left rear wheel. It was not a viable means of propulsion, as it only moves the car ~6” at a time, but it allowed you to manually propel the car, which satisfied the law. Once the car was on the market, other companies took notice and started producing their own 50cc sans permis cars, and the regulations were soon amended to be more fitting for car production (primarily by eliminating the need for a method of manual propulsion).

  

Interestingly, even though it is a single-seat vehicle, it has 2 doors: 1 normal style door, and 1 folding gullwing door. The reason for this is that if you parked the vehicle in a tight spot, the folding gullwing door made it easier to get in and out of the car. In addition, there is a story of someone test driving a pre-production single-door example for a press review, and they ended up turning too quickly and rolled the car onto its side. As luck would have it, they rolled onto the door side, so they were trapped! After this is supposedly when Acoma decided to add the second door, as well as the iconic and humorous small stabilizer wheels at the front corners to comfort any prospective buyers that had heard about the tipping incident. The car is actually very stable, thanks to the central, very low seating position, so it's very surprising that someone managed to lay the car on its side. It also has no reverse gear, but with its extremely light weight and sub-6-foot turning circle, this was never much of a concern. Accompanying the extremely tight turning circle (~90 degrees of steering angle in either direction) was a direct 1:1 steering ratio, so full steering lock was only about 1/4 turn of the steering wheel in either direction.

  

Surprisingly, these cars were quite expensive (more than a new VW, at the time), as they initially had a sort of monopoly on the sales of cars to people without licenses or with suspended licenses. Even so, they sold several thousand during the production run and continuously expanded the model lineup after the Mini Comtesse, leading to Acoma being one of the most successful French microcar companies.