Very Rare 1955 Iso Isetta. This rare little car is NOT a BMW Isetta – it is an ISO Isetta. The original Isetta was created by the Italian firm of Iso SpA. Iso's owner, Renzo Rivolta, was building small trucks and motor scooters. He decided he would like to build a small car for mass distribution and the engineers Ermenegildo Preti and Pierluigi Raggi designed the small car to use the motorcycle engine of the Iso Moto 200 and named it Isetta, which means little ISO.
The engine is Iso’s own 236 cc two-stroke motorcycle engine with a starter that also doubles as the generator. The transmission has forward speeds and reverse. The little car gets between 42 and 58 mpg!
In 1954, Iso entered several Isettas in the Mille Miglia where they took the top three spots in the economy classification. Over the 1000 mile course, the drivers achieved an average speed of 43 MPH.
Renzo Rivolta wanted to concentrate on his new Iso Rivolta sports car, and made licensing deals with plants in Spain (where this one was built) and Belgium that were assembling Isettas using Italian made Iso components. BMW began talking with Rivolta in mid-1954 and bought a license and the complete Isetta body tooling as well. It is estimated that only around 1000 Iso Isettas were built before BMW began building Isettas. BMW built around 10,000 units just in the last 8 months of 1955 and went on to build over 161,000 units! In our research we cannot find another Iso Isetta for sale in the world, while there are several BMW units for sale at any given time. The sliding window BMW Isetta commonly sells in the $30,000+ range and the bubble window BMW’s can sell in the $40K to $60K range. It is highly likely that the extreme rarity of an original Iso Isetta bubble window example will continue to increase in value at higher rate than the BMW version.
We have serviced this car in our shop and it starts immediately and runs excellent. The transmission and brakes function as they should. The car appears to have non rusty original panels, frame and suspension and has obviously spent most of its life in an indoor collection after a restoration many years ago. The overall cosmetics are very good with the only obvious exception of a cracked Plexiglas vent window. This little Iso deserves to go back to another collection, perhaps with some other Italian stablemates.
We always welcome and recommend personal inspection of each car we offer for sale. We have a full service shop with mostly vintage techs to match our mostly vintage cars and can assist you with inspection and/or repair of any car we offer for sale. Please call Brighton Motorsports @480-483-4682 or email eric@brightonmotorsports.com with any questions Nationwide financing and delivery can be arranged
