There’s never just one right way to do things. I know this is something that most of us have long understood, but sometimes it’s easy to forget, as we can tend to fall into ruts of doing things one particular way. The way we think of cars can be like this. There’s certain establish solutions to the problems cars aim to solve, and once we find solutions that work, we tend to repeat those solutions, over and over. But what happens when circumstances force you to think in new ways? That’s when interesting things happen.

The cars I want to talk about today absolutely found other ways to solve their problems. In the case of these cars, the problem was how to be a family car. Now, by “family car” I mean something pretty specific: how to seat four people in a vehicle with a bit of room for luggage, and allow for each group of two – usually divided between parents and children – to have their own door.

I know there have been plenty of cars that were used as family cars that didn’t exactly meet these requirements – the Volkswagen Beetle, for example, was used as a family car by millions (my own family included), but if you wanted to let the kids out of the back seat, someone up front had to get out and flip the seat forward. The two cars I’m discussing now – the BMW 600 and the Zündapp Janus – did not have this restriction, and they were even smaller than the Beetle.

Before I get too deep into these microcar weeds, I should remind you that I’m talking about these cars because our Autopian co-Founder Beau has them, and is considering selling one or both of them. That’s right! It’s an other episode of Should I Sell It?

Both of these cars are from postwar Germany, right at about the time when the economy was just starting to pick up again in the later 1950s, but definitely not prosperous, at least not yet. There was still a demand for simple, cheap transportation, especially cars that could hold a family of four, at prices below even that of the ubiquitous Beetle.

The constraints of the economy pushed carmakers to try novel design approaches, ones that didn’t even really feel like cars, as they are generally understood. BMW, for example, found itself after the war with a lineup of luxurious vehicles that precisely nobody was buying. They needed something dirt cheap to make and sell, used as little fuel as possible, yet was still somehow usable. They found their answer in an Italian company that used to make refrigerators: Iso.

Iso was once Isothermos, the maker of fridges, and the car the company came up with to meet Italy’s postwar trasport demand seemed like a fridge itself, with one big front-opening door. The fridge wasn’t the actual inspiration for this design – it just made sense from an economic standpoint, as it was one door that exposed both seats instead of requiring two – but it was a funny coincidence.

The resulting car was unlike anything really seen before: an egg with a front door, enclosing a bench ahead of a small engine, all propped on four wheels, the rear ones set quite close together. The odd layout worked, and BMW took notice of the car, and the company ended up licensing the body design from Iso, buying the tooling, and then made their own modifications, including adapting one of BMW’s more powerful motorcycle engines for the car.

The resulting BMW Isetta proved to be a hit, and was just what the company needed: a car they could actually sell. Eventually, BMW refined the design into a bigger, somewhat up-market family car, the 600, which now featured two rows of seats, and a door for each row:

The BMW 600 was a packaging marvel, and in many ways can be considered the ideal minimal expression of a four-seater car. It’s smaller than a BMC Mini, but easier for the four passengers to get in and out of, and surprisingly roomy inside.

The rear-mounted flat-twin BMW motorcycle engine made about 20 hp, pretty good for the scale of the car and the era, and while the 600 was a very clever, if quirky design, the market in Germany was tending to want less quirkiness, as the slow recovery after the war was allowing for more traditionally-designed sorts of cars.

But that’s boring! And not every carmaker got pressured out of making weird cars. Some leaned into it, hard, like motorcycle maker Zündapp.

Zündapp never built cars before – and never would again – but the Janus was worth making an exception for. In 1954, Zündapp decided they needed to branch out into more weather-protected vehicles, which meant a car instead of a motorcycle. Zündapp reached out to aircraft maker Dornier, who had built a prototype car called the Delta, a strange little trapezoid of a car that featured upward-opening hatches at both ends.

The Delta was a genuinely novel design: engine in the middle, seats at either end, facing in opposite directions. It was unexpected, but really sort of brilliant, offering a surprising amount of room for people in a remarkably minimal envelope. Zündapp took the concept and refined it a bit, making the side doors side-opening and making the styling a bit less alien-shed-looking:

The odd layout remained the same: an engine in the very middle (a 245cc one-cylinder two-stroke making 14 hp and unique to the car) driving the rear wheels, some luggage space in the middle above and beside the engine (and fuel tank) and two bench seats, one facing forward, one aft.

The Janus was really like two Isettas mounted back-to-back and while it did look sort of strange, I think Zündapp’s designers did a good job of keeping it from looking that strange.

The amazing thing about the Janus is just how roomy it is inside; look at that diagram up there and you can see that there’s a surprising amount of legroom. It feels open and roomy inside, car more so than its exterior dimensions would suggest.

It’s a really clever out-of-the-box solution to the four-seat/a door for everyone family car problem, and in some ways I think it’s a shame the layout never caught on. I guess people like an easier way to talk to one another in different rows? You’d think that separation could be a plus.

Interestingly, when Dick Teague was first designing the AMC Pacer, one of his first ideas was to make something a lot like a ’70s-era Janus. Early sketches, like that one above, show a mid-mounted Wankel rotary engine and seats facing front and rear! The Pacer is already delightfully odd, but this would have been next-level. Some customizer really should make this sketch a reality.

These are both remarkable and clever cars, brilliant and offbeat solutions to the family car problem. I wish Beau could keep both, but I know how reality can be a jerk sometimes. So, what should he do? Sell both? Keep both? Keep one or the other? Let’s hear what you think!

The post The Horrors Of War Led To Germany Building Cars With Doors Like Refrigerators appeared first on The Autopian.

The SEMA show in Las Vegas is coming up, and this massive industry event has given automakers an excuse to build wildly modified versions of real production cars. Nissan is joining the party with something called the Sentra Spec V concept, but there’s an asterisk for now. In an age of easily-generated slop, someone pulling the levers seems to have published images of this concept car with some anomalies. Let’s take a look.

While there may have been a Sentra Nismo available to buy as recently as 2019, that thing only offered 188 horsepower. To get a properly hot Sentra, you’re going to have to go back somewhere between 2012 and 1991 depending on your definition of hot. 2012 for the final year of the 200-horsepower Renault Megane-related SE-R Spec-V, 2006 for the final year of its predecessor, and 1991 for the first year of the original SE-R. The one that started it all.

On paper, a Sentra with a 300-horsepower two-liter turbocharged engine, a manual gearbox with a limited-slip differential, GT-R Recaro seats, massive Brembo brakes, and the requisite suspension mods sounds enormously tantalizing. Although it’s a one-off in its current form, it sounds a vision of what a Sentra fettled to fight the Honda Civic Type R and Hyundai Elantra N would be like. There’s just one problem: The photos Nissan’s released of it appear to, at the very least, have AI-generated components. Huh?

Motor 1 was the first outlet to point out that something is off with these press photos, and the front-three-quarter shot above reveals something strange. Look at that C-pillar treatment. That’s not the current Sentra’s C-pillar treatment, and the trailing edge of the rear door glass is completely the wrong shape.

Above is closer to what the greenhouse and C-Pillar are supposed to look like, but what’s going on with the front emblem?

It should say “Nissan” but it just doesn’t. Instead, it looks like a series of mutated scribbles have replaced the text everyone expects to be there.

Next up, here’s the profile shot Nissan provided, and there’s something obviously wrong here. That quarter window on the C-Pillar isn’t actually a window on a real Sentra, but instead just a piece of black plastic trim. Nevertheless, it’s rendered as actual glass here, with a transparent section and frit for bonding it to the C-pillar and all.

Also, what is going on with the lug nut situation? All of them aren’t the same size or indeed, equidistant around each lug circle.

Around back, that C-pillar applique continues to erroneously be rendered as an actual window, but there’s another bit of weirdness here. The Sentra Spec V concept supposedly comes on Yokohama Advan AD09 tires, but that’s not the tread pattern of the AD09 displayed in this photo. An AD09 has two wiggly circumferential grooves, while these tires have three straight ones and completely different lateral grooves.

Moving to the interior: what’s going on with the Sparco logos on the passenger harness’s shoulder belts, along with the safety labelling further down on the harnesses? Those aren’t the right logos, and the text is completely illegible. These weren’t ultra-low-resolution images here, so fuzzy appearances of familiar letters should be discernible if these images were completely real.

At least the engine shot looks legit – at first glance. But upon closer inspection, the text on the brake fluid reservoir cap has been reduced to mush that sure looks like an artifact of AI. What gives?

Needless to say, I’ve reached out to Nissan for comment on the matter, and will update this as soon as I hear more. Building something cool for SEMA is great, but releasing slop like this undermines the whole project by casting doubt on how much of this is legitimate. Also, you’d expect a project like this with a custom Bomex body kit to be built in CAD these days, so why not use those renderings for exterior teasers? Answers on a postcard…

UPDATE: We now have a statement from Nissan, and I’ve inserted the full thing below.

The Sentra Spec-V Concept is a physical vehicle that was photographed in a real-world garage setting. During post-production, AI-assisted editing tools were used to create and refine elements of the image backgrounds. In that process, unintended inaccuracies were introduced to some vehicle details in the published images.

We’re working with our creative partners to replace the affected assets with corrected imagery, and we appreciate the feedback that brought the issue to our attention. We regret any confusion the edited images may have caused.

The Sentra Spec-V Concept itself is exactly that: a real, physical concept vehicle. We look forward to showing it in person when it makes its SEMA debut next week.

Basically, it sounds like an external creative partner (it’s extremely uncommon for OEMs to have in-house photographers for shooting vehicle media sets) used AI tools to edit actual photographs, and this slop-affected set made it past review, all the way out to publication. On the one hand, it’s great that Nissan’s aware of the problem and is working to fix it. On the other, it’s hard not to wonder how these sloppified photos made it out in the first place.

Top graphic images: Nissan; DepositPhotos.com

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This had its moment of outrage some time ago, but I did want to mention that the Trump proposal to sell a chunk of Yosemite off to one of his developer friends is both horrifying and also pretty well part and parcel of Republican orthodoxy for many decades now. Republicans love to trot out Theodore Roosevelt to show they are environmentalists too, but that’s a looong time ago, plus Trump has said that TR sucks anyway; whoever has his ear is one of the McKinley fans that want to repeal the entire 20th century. But again, nothing new under the sun here. Karl Rove can be disgusted at Trump and Paxton if he wants, but openly stated 25 years ago that he wanted to repeal the Progressive Era, so this is what he wanted, if with less class. So again, my basic thesis of the Trump years is that almost all the differences between him and previous presidents are much more about style rather than substance. What credentials Republicans might have had on environmental issues died a very long time ago, really by the late 70s. They have a mission and it’s to destroy any common good in America. Reagan, both Bushes, every leading Republican senator and congressman, the judicial class, and Trump, they all more or less believe the same things on most issues.

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Even if you don’t drive a car or truck that drinks diesel, I’m sure you’re aware at just how absurdly high diesel prices have gotten. Average diesel price per gallon is now close to seven bucks, and it’s never really been anywhere close to that. Because diesel is really the fuel that drives so much of our economy – farms use it extensively for machinery, trains use it, trucking relies on it, and so on – the cascading effects of these high fuel prices are being felt everywhere. This isn’t good, and so far there doesn’t even seem to be a solution on the horizon. It’s really pretty bleak.

All of this fretting over diesel has made me wonder about something: where’s all the biodiesel?

I remember back in the early-to-mid-2000s when it was actively hard to find a Mercedes-Benz diesel wagon for sale because everyone was buying them up to convert to be able to run on used French fry oil. Companies were popping up all over the place to do these conversions – there was even one near where I used to live in Los Angeles that was sort of famous, called LoveCraft Biofuels. These places worked out deals with local restaurants to convert their used cooking oil into usable diesel fuel, provided your car had a few relatively minor modifications to heat the fuel to keep it liquid and some filtration systems.

Look, here’s an old commercial for them, featuring a guy with a name that at first auditory-glance sounds like mine, but he’s a lot better-looking:

Places like these were just small-scale, though. They were converting Benz diesels for hipsters one by one, this wasn’t biofuel on an industrial scale. But that was promised, too! There were plans for plants that turned turkey offal and other slaughterhouse wastes into diesel, or crushing soybeans into oils that can become diesel, and more, and for a while it seemed like we’d soon be able to make as much diesel as we needed from renewable biological sources that would be just turned into waste, anyway.

At some point, though, these biofuel enterprises seemed to recede from the spotlight. Lovecraft closed in 2009, and a lot of other small biofuel companies did as well, and I just generally stopped hearing as much about these sorts of enterprises. So, what happened? Why did all these biodiesel initiatives not seem to pan out, and why hasn’t the biodiesel industry stepped up in this time of diesel crisis to help free us from the tyranny of traditional diesel supply issues?

It turns out that there are a lot of reasons. There’s a number of articles online that explain a number of reasons why, but I wanted to hear from an expert, so I reached out to a few. One of the people who responded to me in detail was Monte Shaw, the executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. Shaw’s response is quite comprehensive and makes clear that it’s not really one specific reason, but rather a disappointing cocktail of technical, economic, and regulatory reasons:

Biomass-based diesel, which includes both renewable diesel and biodiesel, is stepping up to help in 2026. However, there are practical limitations. Just as traditional refiners can only run their plants at full capacity, the same is true for biodiesel. Each month in 2026 is setting new production records for biodiesel as plants have ramped up and are running flat out today.

You mentioned California. Because of state policies there, I believe over 75% of “diesel” used in the state is actually a combination of renewable diesel and biodiesel. That is a remarkable achievement and should have insulated the state a bit from the current global spike.

But elsewhere inconsistent policy has held back biodiesel. The federal government let the blenders tax credit lapse at the end of 2024 without a replacement for over a year. At the same time the EPA set lackluster Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) blending levels for 2023-2025. These policy signals curtailed the growth of biodiesel production capacity with many projects being cancelled.

This includes soybean crush facilities that extract the soybean oil that had been planned. We need to grow feedstock availability to grow production. With better tax and RFS policy in place for 2026, we’re starting to see projects move forward again, but they take time to build and start impacting the market.

So with over 5 billion gallons of production capacity, renewable diesel and biodiesel are making a significant contribution to diesel supplies in the US, especially in California. And we’re excited to see growth back on track. But just like petroleum refineries, we don’t have a magic switch to flip to double or triple production overnight.

All diesel engines can use B20 (20% biodiesel). All can use 100% renewable diesel. So there is no equipment limit. It’s a matter of ensuring a stable investment market to spur growth. Biodiesel can and will do more in the future if given a chance.

So, there already is biodiesel being made and used, and that’s great, because it is renewable and helps the US maintain some degree of energy independence, but there are inherent issues with it, even if there were no regulatory hurdles. The feedstock for biofuels is simply more expensive than petroleum, and those same feedstocks – corn, soybeans, vegetable oils – are also human food sources, so there’s a limit on how much can be earmarked for fuel use.

Some sources of biodiesel, like soybeans, seem to be significantly more expensive. There are also issues with transporting biofuel diesel, because biofuels tend to be more corrosive to metals, which means they’re not suitable for pipeline transport, and must be shipped by truck or rail, which is significantly more expensive.

I also reached out to Marc Dreyfors, the manager of Orange County Eco-Innovations Park, which includes Carolina Biofuels, which operates a small fleet of biodiesel-fueled buses for Duke University. Dreyfors noted the regulatory and economic hurdles, especially:

So a new product that’s on the market called renewable diesel. Yeah. It is the same feedstock that biodiesel does, and it produces a more compatible fuel with less side effects issues with it running in modern diesels.

So this, you know, there’s a giant sucking sound at this point of renewable diesel to the feedstock that was wants biodiesel. And then there’s also the loss of the producer’s credit. There was a production credit, blender’s credit. There’s still a production credit, but there’s a blender credit for a dollar for every part, you know, part per million of biodiesel that will blend it into diesel, you got a dollar back from the government. Right. So now it’s just a flat producer’s credit, which tends to benefit the larger producers, whereas the blender’s credit was kind of more egalitarian, and that anybody who blended diesel in with biodiesel could claim the credit.

It’s the influence of the large fossil fuel companies. You’ve got the soybean producer association who wants to sell their soybeans and get produced into biofuel when soybean prices are low, you know, or have some kind of subsidy associated with it.

…

If it’s made at an industrial scale, anything, it’s even harder. We’re unique in that we only make our fuel from recycled food waste, but there’s simply not enough of it to really make a dent, and we have a case for simply using that biodiesel in school buses, because that’s the biggest bang for the buck because it’s reducing air toxic exposure and the engines are old.

The current administration hasn’t been prioritizing biodiesel in any capacity, really, domestically produced or otherwise. Imported biodiesel fell dramatically since 2025 due to the loss of tax credits for such fuels, for example.

What all of this adds up to is really a sort of perfect shitstorm for biofuels. While it all seemed so promising – fuel from French fry oils and other wastes! – the reality of scaling it up just hasn’t proven to be economically viable, at least not yet. And without good incentives or support for companies that wish to try to make these sorts of fuels at scale, it’s all a non-starter.

Now, if the current diesel situation continues, this could change: diesel fuels can be made from these waste products, after all, and if diesel continues to rise in cost, it may end up becoming an economically viable proposition. There are also processes that can turn non-food sources like wood waste into biofuel, and there’s currently promising-looking research into these processes, but a large-scale, economically viable enterprise for this has yet to emerge. But it could!

Is it going to help us right now? No. Is the idea of taking wood waste and turkey guts and turning it into usable diesel still a compelling idea? Absolutely. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’re there yet, and we don’t have people in power, politically or economically, vested in making sure biodiesel actually happens at larger scales.

Who knows what the future may hold, but for right now, biodiesel isn’t going to be our magic oily bullet.

Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com

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