If you are looking to buy a ride-on, electric-powered car for a lucky small person in your life, there are plenty of pretty fancy options for under $300. Less than $200 will buy a drivable mini Maserati GranCabrio with working lights, gears, and a horn.
Go upmarket to really spoil a child, and Bloomingdale’s will speed over a Freddo Lamborghini Aventador for around $2,300.
But if you want to go full indulgent parent, why not shift up a gear—or several—and order a two-thirds-size replica Ferrari Testa Rossa, licensed by the Italian car-maker and hand-built near Oxford, England, for $156,000?
The Little Car Company, a start-up that builds the ultimate baby cars for pampered juniors, does offer slightly more economical luxury rides, starting with a scaled-down 1920s Bugatti—one of its Baby II models is practically a bargain at around $60,000. There’s even a Mini-Me version of James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 for around $136,000, with changing license plates, pop-out pretend machine guns, and a rear smoke generator—but thankfully minus the ejector seat and oil-slick spreader.
The Little Car Company is probably one of the few Western automakers doing well. The 65-employee business’s 46-year-old founder, Ben Hedley, says it’s profitable after just four years in business, despite its birth being blighted by the coronavirus and Brexit. It makes five or six cars a week, with several hundred already sold and a three-to-six-month waiting list. Harrods, in London, does stock a few off-the-shelf cars for when the stamping of tiny feet becomes too insistent for a caring parent to resist.
Buyers are predominantly in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, Hedley says, unsurprisingly in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. The company is negotiating to get into China, but Hedley finds it interesting that, even pre–Ukraine war, not a single Russian has ever ordered a Little Car. “I suspect that given the quality of Soviet cars, the idea of a classic just isn’t in the culture,” he tells AIR MAIL, referencing the country’s reputation for producing poor quality automobiles.
Regarding the Little Car Company as an auto manufacturer, as British authorities officially do, may seem like an overstatement. But a visit to its spotless production line shows why it’s far more than a toy-maker.
The cars, which are capable of speeds of over 50 m.p.h. but are limited to 25 m.p.h. in the U.S. for safety reasons, are meticulously crafted using the same coach-building and mechanical skills—and often the same parts and materials—as you’d find at a real luxury-car factory. It’s hard not to be amazed by the quality of the engineering.
“We have to meet the quality standards of the brands,” explains Hedley, “and it’s because we can do that that makers like Ferrari and Aston Martin will supply us with the paints, the leathers, and even many actual parts they use.”
Why would manufacturers do that? The answer is perhaps surprising: “Even kids from well-off families today are less interested in cars and in driving than previous generations were. So this is a way for car brands to engage with future customers. If your first car was a Ferrari, albeit a scaled-down one, you might just aspire to own one.”
Little Cars are recommended for youngsters 14 years old and up, but the company acknowledges that much younger children sometimes drive them. The vehicles come with a remote control for parents to stop the electric motor if a child seems to be making a break for the highway.
AIR MAIL took a basic $74,000 Aston Martin DB5J Vantage model for a ride around a former Royal Air Force base, where the Little Car Company builds its vehicles, and found the fit a little tight for an adult, but tolerable. The top of the windshield does rather cut across the line of vision, and the ride was a little jerky and couldn’t be mistaken for even two-thirds of the real thing, but it’s definitely enjoyable.
One question raised by the whole operation, and there’s no way of putting this nicely: Are children with a five- or six-figure car—or, in some cases, several cars—necessarily the nicest kids on the planet? From the moment you see the lineup of tiny Aston Martins, Bugattis, and Ferraris parked by the factory reception, it’s hard not to think of certain unpleasant, spoiled children in literature, from J. K. Rowling’s Dudley Dursley to Roald Dahl’s Veruca Salt.
Hedley, a Cambridge-educated mechanical engineer, is not unaware that his core customers could conceivably be quite appalling people. “But, in fact, the parents tend to be absolutely lovely,” he says. “They’re passionate, they love the brands, and want to enthuse their kids about great cars.”
Could it be, we speculated—and Hedley thought it possible—that the typical Russian oligarch lacks the sense of humor required to get the idea of a miniature classic car? From circus clowns to Shriners in parades, there is something innately amusing about small cars, especially when driven by adults.
This leads to a key discovery about the Little Car Company: a large proportion of its buyers are full-grown adults purchasing for themselves. (Some collectors buy the entire range of Little Cars to resell them for more than the list price, but they are a minority.)
“We have a Dutch client who has registered his Bugatti Baby as a historic car and is driving on the roads. And there’s an American couple who bought a Ferrari as what they called their ‘mail car.’ They said their driveway is two miles long, so they wanted something fun to go and get the mail. The Ferrari can do 60 to 70 miles on a charge, so a four-mile round trip is no problem.”
Having realized there is an adult market to serve, the company has expanded into street-legal Little Cars. There’s now a scaled-up version of an R/C car from the 1980s, the Tamiya Wild One MAX, which retails for around $45,000, and most recently an 80-percent-size 1929 Bentley Blower, starting out around $100,000.
“We have the Bentley touring the U.S. now, and the interest is phenomenal,” Hedley reports.
“You won’t do 130 m.p.h. in our Bentley, like the original. But there’s an aggression in modern cars, both in aesthetics and in performance, and you don’t need it. In our cars, you can have fun at 20 m.p.h.”
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology