Challenged for garage space? Consider this micro-car ‘collection’

It was somewhere between the 1940 Bantam pickup truck and the 1970 Fiat Moretti 500 coupe that the idea struck me.

I was working my way up and down the aisles where Auctions America had nearly 850 cars parked last weekend at Auburn Auction Park in northeastern Indiana, when I wondered if someone might come to such a sale wanting to start a car collection but faced the reality of being challenged for garage space.

Could someone assemble an interesting group of small cars at such a venue?

Maybe I’m still jealous of those who got to attend the dispersement sale of Bruce Weiner’s Microcar Museum back in 2013. Or maybe it was the two visits this summer to the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, where Jeff Lane has filled an old bread-baking building with an eclectic car collection that includes dozens of very smallish cars.

So, what sort of car collection might someone have assembled over the Labor Day weekend at Auction America’s sale if the criteria was vehicles with footprints no larger, or just barely larger than that of an old Volkswagen Beetle?

Here’s what I found:

Photos by Larry Edsall