The subject of urban mobility is one that designers, corporations, and governments around the world are trying to solve. How do you get people around a city without clogging up its streets with cars? For some, the solution is making personal transportation vehicles smaller. But motorcycles aren’t exactly the safest way to travel and trains are sort of stuck to a predetermined path. Back in the 1990s, BMW thought it had the solution when it created its first scooter. The BMW C1 was a scooter that tried to be better than a train and as safe as a car thanks to a safety cage, crumple zones, and seatbelts. But, there’s a reason you don’t see these in the United States.
With exceptions for bikes like the Honda Super Cub and scooters like the Vespa, most motorcycles don’t really try to solve major mobility problems. My Triumph Rocket III is just a whole heaping of a good time and not much more. Some motorcycle manufacturers aspire for their wares to do more. A recent example is Erik Buell’s Fuell Fllow. That electric motorcycle isn’t just trying to be a fun ride, but it wants to be the ultimate solution to urban mobility woes. Fuell is so confident that it thinks you’ll ride the Fllow rather than ride a train. I stumbled upon another occurrence of this concept, but it happened two decades ago with BMW, and it’s properly crazy.
Solving Urban Mobility By Scaling Down
If you live in a major city, you’re likely well aware of the pains of getting around. Drive into Chicago, Los Angeles, or just about any major city and you’ll find yourself sitting in traffic. Then, once you finally get into the city center, you have to navigate your vehicle around the streets, find parking, pay for that parking, and do all of that while reaching your destination on time.
Maybe you don’t want to drive a car. Ok, now you have to figure out your way around a public transportation network, which may or may not totally suck where you live. Some cities have problems with buses and trains just not being where they should be when they need to be there. What I’m getting at here is navigating a city can be a real headache.
One solution is to buy a scooter or a motorcycle. The benefits rack up quickly. Bikes can be bought for cheap, take up little space, get really good fuel economy, and can be insured for less than the price of a good lunch. Motorcycles can also slice their way through a crowded city in ways cars and buses cannot. Of course, going against the motorcycle is your riding gear as crash protection and if the weather is bad, you’re probably not going to have a good time.
Automakers and motorcycle manufacturers have been trying out different ways to make city driving better for decades. Using Europe for an example, Mercedes-Benz has been trying to make the perfect city car since 1972. Meanwhile, Volkswagen with its Lupo and BMW with its Mini are other attempts at making a good city car. Unlike Volkswagen and Mercedes, BMW also tried to make the ultimate city two-wheeler.
The C1’s Development
In 1992, BMW rolled into the Cologne, Germany motorcycle show with what it called the C1 Concept. This vehicle wasn’t quite a motorcycle, but it wasn’t really a scooter either. As BMW writes in its retrospective, the C1 Concept was the beginning of a new kind of vehicle:
The idea was thus to create a vehicle combining the merits of a motorised two-wheeler (the particular pleasure of riding a singletrack vehicle, feeling the air rushing by, reducing space requirements to a minimum when riding and parking, and ensuring relatively low cost of purchase and cost of ownership) with the benefits of an automobile (comfort, safety, transport capacity). And this special combination of qualities had to be visible and tangible for the driver, meaning specifically that he or she should be able to drive without a motorcycle helmet and special protective wear, while nevertheless enjoying superior safety on the road. Another feature of the concept was to provide at least a certain standard of protection from wind and weather.
BMW’s conclusion was that while cars will be necessary for mobility, cars cannot meet all mobility demands, especially in densely populated areas. Those are ambitious plans. The C1 Concept (above) was supposed to be a motorcycle that was as safe as a city car but with the space savings and thrill of a motorcycle, and all for a price so cheap that its monthly payments would be lower than a train pass.
As BMW notes, the project for the C1 started two years before with a contest in subsidiary BMW Technik GmbH. Bernd Nurtsch, an avid motorcyclist, paid attention to motorcycle crash statistics, especially honing in on the crashes he and his friends had survived. This compelled Nurtsch to submit the idea for a new kind of scooter. This scooter would protect its occupants with a safety cell, crumple zone, and seatbelts so that helmets weren’t needed.
BMW was also very serious about safety and set out to engineer a scooter that could crash like a car:
Detlef Helm, at the time the specialist at BMW Technik GmbH for complicated calculations, made a significant contribution to the ensuing feasibility study by his special computation model examining a frame support structure made of pressed aluminium profiles. Providing a kind of safety cell to protect the occupant, this structure with its special longitudinal and transverse stiffness was to be combined with additional deformation elements for the controlled absorption of energy, protecting the driver in a collision with a stationery or mobile object at a speed of up to 50 km/h just about the same way as in a car. And in a collision from the side this configuration was also to give the driver much better protection than on a motorcycle.
You are indeed reading that right! When the C1 reached production, it had an aluminum space-frame safety cell, crumple zones, and a rollbar. The complex safety structure also makes up the roof and windshield that protects the vehicle’s rider from the weather. To test this new motorcycle safety technology, BMW engineers developed special dummies with unique sensors that were used to measure the effectiveness of the vehicle’s structure.
Earlier, I noted how BMW wanted people to ride these without helmets. In order to ensure safe operation without a helmet, BMW studied and tested different types of seatbelt configurations.
After trying out different types of belts, BMW settled on a two-point shoulder belt and an additional three-point belt. These belts featured an inertia-reel system like you’d find in a car, but BMW found that they locked up way too much. So, they were designed specifically to work with the forces involved with riding a motorcycle. The result was that in testing, a belted C1 rider received a lower load on their neck without a helmet than with a helmet.
BMW says its work on making the C1 a safer motorcycle was so good that after years of development and five generations of prototypes, in 1998, both the German Federal Ministry of Transport and the German TÜV Technical Inspection Authority approved the C1’s use without an otherwise mandatory helmet.
BMW also notes other development challenges, including creating a body that was sleek enough to cut through wind while also providing weather protection and maintaining the C1’s safety. The flow of air and water was optimized in a wind tunnel, but on the road, prototypes were at the whims of the wind. BMW says this issue was bad enough that it wondered if the C1 would actually be feasible. Apparently, it took a supercomputer 110 hours of computation against 1.1 million surface cells to come up with a solution that fit BMW’s goals.
When BMW got closer to launch, it reached out to Carozzeria Bertone to handle producing the body while Bombardier’s Rotax would provide the engines.
BMW’s Car-Like Scooter
In 2000, a decade of development became a reality when the BMW C1 finally hit the road. BMW seemed to pull it off. In its marketing, BMW said that the C1 was so safe that it provided the kind of protection offered by a city car and that you wouldn’t need to wear a helmet to ride it.
In the UK, BMW started an aggressive marketing campaign where it touted the C1 as being “less expensive than a monthly tube ticket.” In 2001, monthly London Underground tickets for zones 1 through 3 ran £86.10. BMW decided to undercut it with a financing offer for £75 a month. A base model C1 ran £3,395. To make this scheme work, you had to make a £440.26 down payment, BMW would then make a payment of £255.55 to bring the financed amount down, and you would pay the remaining £2,699.19 over 36 months at £75 a month. Due to 2.6 percent APR, your total cost was £3,060.55.
Of course, as you’ve probably already noticed, the £75 a month deal did not include fuel, insurance, or repairs, so it was almost certainly more expensive than taking the train. It also didn’t apply if you wanted a higher-end model than the base C1.
The base C1 was targeted at the buyer who just wanted a safe commuter scooter without any bells and whistles. It came painted in an orange-red or a jade. BMW said that the regular C1 was also targeting rental fleets, government fleets, and railway stations. A special white version of the regular C1 was available for authorities.
Next up was the £3,745 C1 Family’s Friend. As the name suggests, this one was supposed to be the family runabout. To make it family-friendly and to attract teenagers, the Family’s Friend comes painted in a bright orange or yellow with blue.
The idea here is that the parents had a fun little around town vehicle and when the family’s kid turns 16, they could also ride the C1 Family’s Friend. BMW notes standard equipment including large graphics, a frunk, and a kit to fasten luggage cases.
Finally, the flagship was the £3,920 C1 Executive. Again, the name isn’t very imaginative here and it was for businesspeople and insurance agents looking for a commuter. These came in a fancy metallic gray color and came with features like a reading light, a cellphone support, an additional storage box, the aforementioned luggage case fastening kit, a luggage net, and luggage railing.
Other neat tricks with the C1 include an onboard computer system that could be removed and used as an alarm clock, a two-speaker sound system, and even a heater. BMW also had some wacky ideas for C1-specific gear. Since your body sits within the safety cage, BMW said you didn’t need to wear any motorcycle gear. But it still wanted to offer such items as a jacket with cuffs that turned into gloves, a raincoat, and jackets with pockets that wouldn’t be blocked by the seatbelts.
Innovative, But A Failure
I couldn’t find many period reviews, but one from the staff of Motorcycle News didn’t paint a great picture of the riding experience:
Small wheels, quite a bit of weight and some of it’s carried high – it’s not the recipe for perfect handling. The BMW C1’s not about scything round long sweeping country bends though – it’s an urban dodger. It works fine in that role except it’s a little wider than conventional scooters which can be annoying. The BMW C1’s 125cc engine’s an unremarkable four-stroke single producing a respectable 15bhp. But it’s a heavy motorcycle at 185kg – all the 1000cc sports bikes weigh less. This means performance is pretty sluggish – the BMW C1 willl pull away from cars when the lights go green but not by much. The 200 version (which was actually 176cc) is nippier.
In another period review archived on Visorcat, a tester from newspaper Business a.m. managed to tip one over:
How does one refer to the C1? The newer and larger C1 200 certainly does not feel like a motorcycle, despite its 170cc engine and the fact that you need a full bike licence to ride it. With its big, comfy, car-like seat you can sit back, almost put your feet up, and enjoy the ride. It is a twist ‘n’ go like a scooter, but how many scooters have an interior light, a roof, windscreen and wiper, a glovebox, and seatbelts? But something tells me it is not a car…
Maybe it is the car for motorcyclists, or the scooter for car drivers. Whatever it is, this caped crusader of a vehicle attracts a lot of attention wherever you go and is brilliant fun to ride, especially if you don’t mind people laughing, staring, smiling, waving and pointing at you. In the end, you just smile and wave back.
Ironically, it was the roof of the C1 that was to be the undoing of my brief but mostly pleasurable relationship with this strange machine. Turning tightly to position myself at a set of traffic lights, I lost my balance – and dropped it. Unfortunately, the C1’s biggest “safety” feature sandwiched my hand between it and an ambulance, so I am now nursing a broken wrist and a bruised ego.
At first, power came from a 124.9cc Rotax single making 15 HP. It was good for a top speed of 64 mph. In 2001, a version with a larger 176.3cc single making 18 HP was released, and that one was good for speeds up to 70 mph.
Despite the innovative features, the BMW C1 never really caught on. From 2000 until the C1’s cancellation after 2002, BMW moved just 12,614 units. Part of the failure of the C1 to catch on is attributed to Sweden and the UK not allowing the C1 to be ridden without a helmet. Still, the UK made up a quarter of those about 12,000 units.
Sadly, those of us in America still have to wait a couple of years before these start becoming legal. If you’re one of our European readers, I have good news! These seem to be relatively cheap and you can find them for under €2,000. The most expensive one I found is still an affordable €5,000.
This is a scooter motorcycle thing I’m putting down on my import wishlist. The BMW C1 is certainly not the only enclosed scooter out there, but from the looks of it, the C1 was certainly one of the most ambitious. How many other times has a motorcycle manufacturer tried to call their bikes as safe as a car?
(Images: BMW)
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I think BMW should’ve offered a 300cc version. That little bit of extra torque would’ve meant a lot for hauling around all that weight.
Also, in an alternate timeline, Piaggio could’ve made an MP3 with a roof like this, with soft side covers that retract into the roof pillars to make it a 4-season bike.
Man, those are a blast from the past! I was in Germany in the early 2000s and saw tons of these in Munich and Frankfurt, lined up for rental use. I thought the roll cages were rain guards. I wish I had looked closer but I didn’t because I was too busy gawking at — you guessed it — the Smart cars which hadn’t come to the US yet.
Between the BMW C1 and the Smart Fortwo and the way 2000s tech emphasized miniaturization, I remember thinking to myself, obviously, this is what the future of transportation looks like.
I’m honestly still kind of salty that things haven’t turned out that way.
There are so many bike’s and only so much time to snap a picture to prove it exits, but I am 100% sure Mr. Barber has one of these in the museum I briefly toured for the 4th time during my last Chin track days, rain delay. I’m scared of motorcycles, and the people who hit them, I really wish these had caught on.
Back in the day, I got to try one for a few days in Frankfurt. It was a fun enough machine, but in the city it couldn’t compete with convenience of public transit or just plain walking. Where is was ideal was in the small suburban villages with spotty PT and nice quiet roads to ride on. Really, the design wasn’t bad, it was more the use case.
I think the whole Changli saga here on this site is a bit of parallel. There are plenty of places in North America too low a density for walking and viable transit, but not requiring a 10+ mile drive on the freeway to run every errand. This is where this category of vehicle could shine.
Okay, so who put the hand there? I”m fairly certain the C1 itself didn’t do it. 🙂
It’s equal parts amusing and frustrating that “visorcat” didn’t take any responsibility for the incident, which was quite obviously caused by operator error.
I’m not really a scooter person (motorcycles? heck yes) but like the overall design and the goal. IIRC Honda briefly offered their own scooter with a roof around the same time. Here’s a link but I’m not sure this is the one that was actually sold:
https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2001/c011017-tms2-eng.html
Eh, it’s only reflexive to put out your hand to steady yourself, especially slowly tipping towards another vehicle (an ambulance no less!) at a stop light.
The hand might have actually saved them on a regular motor bike, but then again they probably wouldn’t have dropped in the first place either.
Not saying it’s a good idea, just that people tend to do silly things in the moment. There is a reason small open vehicles (side by side ATVs) come with window nets to keep all arms inside the roll cage.
I managed to learn in my teens riding BMX and mountain bikes to tuck and roll instead of putting out my hands. Your shoulder and back and side are a lot stronger than your wrists, and likely to be unharmed in a low stakes crash.
That thing is so fucking weird. I love it! Too bad they didn’t catch on.
My next door neighbour some years ago had one in faded lemon languishing in his front garden. He bought it because he was attracted by the safety and the weather protection but found it was too cumbersome in London traffic jams – no speed advantage over driving a car and yes you still got wet.
Those C1 scooters were very insanely popular in Paris during the early aughts. Many Parisians chose C1 as to keep their coiffure impeccable and unruffled by avoiding wearing the mandatory helmets. The large optional cargo box behind the safety cage was very useful for stowing away the grocery shopping, picnic baskets, etc. No word about whether the cargo box was large enough to store the baguette in its entirety…
I have seen some of Roller C1 modified to have the seat outside the safety cage for the “plus one” rider (that back seat rider must wear helmet).
I once spoke with an owner in Sweden who swore by the C1 as a commuter and the perfect complement to the family SAAB.
Going back in history, the Ner-A-Car was a serious atempt to bring safety and convenience to motorcycling.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fthevintagent.com%2F2018%2F01%2F30%2Froad-test-1923-ner-a-car%2F&psig=AOvVaw0e_RC49vVogZH5FG6GC_qV&ust=1693596478926000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CA8QjRxqFwoTCJC059rQh4EDFQAAAAAdAAAAABAE
Well would you look at that. I never have an answer when people ask what I would import when it becomes legal. Now I do!
Motoworks on Western had a used one of these on the floor a long time ago. Not sure how it ended up in the US, but I remember thinking it looked fun and cumbersome at the same time.
“protecting the driver in a collision with a stationery or mobile object”. So if you hit a piece of paper or a cell phone, you’re ok? That seems a bit weak. 😀
Seriously, though, that’s a scooter I might actually feel comfortable riding in city traffic.
There were plenty of these in Paris back in the time. At least there, they sold well.
As for safety – they were way, way safer than a regular scooter or motorcycle, while retaining the agility that inherently contributes to a two wheeled vehicle’s safety.
With the seatbelts, the rider remained inside the cage during a fall and slide. In frontal crashes too.
And it was (mostly snappy and nimble as a scooter).
If anything, what hurt that vehicle (as well as any large scooter) was the rampant theft of scooters in every big European city.
“With the seatbelts, the rider remained inside the cage during a fall and slide. ” this is what I’m afraid of, when I ride my scooter, if I fall and slide, I’m happy to be able to let the scooter slide alone. I’m terrified just trying to imagine what could happen if your elbow touch the ground during a slide while being attached to your scooter
That’s precisely the thing – while sliding with any scooter is bone chilling and to be avoided, with the C1 you remain mostly protected from road rash within the cage. There are two protruding roll-bars on the sides, protecting you at shoulder to elbow level, and preventing you from touching the ground with your upper body (and if you’re consious – chances are you’ll manage to not scrape your thighs too much neither).
Not a car by any means, but much, much less opening you to road rash than any regular bike or scooter (when free-sliding away from them).
Now, the jury is out on whether it was as safe to ride with a three piece suit, as most ads were showing it, but apples to apples – still safer than a three piece suit on a scooter.
There was a lot of thought put into this thing safety-wise.
How to make a motorcycle as safe as a car:
Step 1: Add 1 or more wheels.
I am probably a bad person, but if a BMW dealer tried to tell me anything on 2 wheels is as safe as a car, I would push it over onto them.
Dust off the concept, swap to an electric drivetrain and BMW could be back in the scooter business. I agree with an earlier comment that a three-wheel tilt design would enhance stability on a top heavy design.
BMW is in the scooter business. They have 3 models for sale including 2 electric ones.
You’re right, of course. I forgot.
i own way too many 2 wheeled BMWs, but i gotta say, that CE02 looks like a blast.
Are bikes under the same 25 year importation rules as cars?
Yes, unless a bike was “not primarily manufactured for on-road use” in which case it is not considered to be a motor vehicle for NHTSA purposes. The Feds will require fairly serious documentation of that status, however, such as a written statement directly from the manufacturer.
“How many other times has a motorcycle manufacturer tried to call their bikes as safe as a car?”
The Ner-a-Car was advertised as not only being nearly a car (as the name would suggest) but actually safer than a car because allegedly it can’t skid:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53155358454_08868b7632_c.jpg
Oh no, it’s time to fall down another rabbit hole… 🙂
The ultimate low-cost vehicle with car-like safety would be an electric microcar with the footprint and aerodynamics of a velomobile. It wouldn’t cost much to build, wouldn’t need a big battery pack, and would be extremely fast if you designed it to be such.
Right now, I can buy off-the-shelf ebike parts for around $5k to make something capable of 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, and if designed properly, have a 200+ mile range on the highway, and the total energy cost would be a small fraction of a penny per mile. This would be components in volume for one vehicle at retail costs, and if such items were mass-ordered, they’d be considerably cheaper. Like a car, it could be fully enclosed for all weather operation, and even have air conditioning. All we need is a properly designed chassis/body to dump that $5k of parts into. Its safety will never be as great as a full-sized modern vehicle due to the difference in mass, but it could certainly be a lot safer than a motorcycle, and possibly comparable to an economy car from the 1980s in terms of safety with a thoughtful design, which would be amazing for something that weighed an order of magnitude less than a normal car.
My current prototype is nowhere near as ambitious at the moment, but with all of 13 horsepower, I can out-accelerate most cars on launch, and at 30-35 mph, can travel 150+ miles on a 1.5 kWh battery. It weighs all of 91 lbs. The next iteration will be fully enclosed with a roof and windshield to keep me dry when it is raining, and will have a roll cage plus crumple zones.
I feel like what you describe is an all weather improvement on the idea of the Vanderhall Edison. Also, the Vanderhall Brawley is the only EV currently on the market I would actually truly like to own, in GT form. I would add a street kit and daily the crap out of that thing.
A miniature, single-occupant Vanderhall Edison, with about 1/8th the aero drag and mass or even less.
Seriously, something like that, if mass produced, wouldn’t cost much more than a moped or scooter or low-end motorcycle, but would have greatly more utility, at least from a materials cost and build hours standpoint. It’s the up-front design and NRE costs that will require mass production for it to be affordable, as it would easily take tens of millions of dollars to correctly develop it and crash test it.
Aptera is building the two-seater version of such a thing, and it only needs about 80 Wh/mile to hold 70 mph on the highway. I’m considering something that will have 1/4th the overall mass, 1/4th the overall CdA, and thus get about 4x the efficiency.
Except for the “single occupant” part, that sounds a lot like the Monoracer.
Except 3 wheels instead of the Monoracer’s 2, which provides static stability as well as improved maximum possible lateral Gs in the corners, plus better aerodynamics(the Monoracer sacrificed some substance for style, as almost everything does, when I seek to buck that garbage trend and emphasize the substance over all else).
Adding a second occupant to a vehicle greatly increases the minimum mass such a vehicle must be, because now you have to design everything to handle the additional mass of the second occupant(more mass for chassis/wheels/tires/brakes/axles/ect), and it inevitably increases the vehicle’s size(frontal area). A one-occupant vehicle versus a two-occupant vehicle, both highway capable, is the difference between it weighing 100-150 lbs, and weighing 400+ lbs. A heavier vehicle also has to dissipate more kinetic energy during a crash, requiring even larger/stronger crushable substructures to protect the occupants from impulse-caused injury.
Mass begets more mass. More mass increases build cost. Accommodating that second occupant easily triples the cost of the vehicle.
The vehicle I want to build, if mass produced, could feasibly be done for under $5k, assuming you can get the EV parts discounted to about half thanks to the high volume. But you’d have to build hundreds of thousands of them in a run to make it happen, and find the customers to buy them to turn a small profit.
You describe it well, but my brain keeps getting stuck and can only imagine a Sinclair C5 with modern batteries.
(This is a criticism of my brain, not your ideas)
If you’ve never seen a C1 with a sidecar, I highly recommend looking it up. I think it’s so dorky that it circles back around to cool.
Challenge…. accepted.
I Goog’ed, I looked, I laughed.
https://images.caradisiac.com/images/1/7/8/9/121789/S0-photo-du-jour-bmw-c1-sidecar-424637.jpg
I was very skeptical about the safety of this scooter, but those crash test videos are impressive. It will never be as safe as a car, but it looks like it would substantially reduce the risk of neck, torso, leg, and pelvic injuries. I’m skeptical how much it reduces head injuries, though. Even with the seatbelt, the head still has a lot of freedom to move and hit objects outside of the scooter or hit the roof itself. It doesn’t take a major impact to cause head injuries, so that isn’t great. I know a lot of people don’t want to wear a helmet, but any helmet (even a 1/2 helmet) seems like it could greatly reduce the risk of head injury in one of these vehicles. I originally thought the roof was kind of silly since it doesn’t provide much protection from the elements, but as a safety device it makes a lot of sense.
It seems like the biggest problem is poor low speed stability due to a high center of gravity. I wonder if it would work better if it had 3 wheels like the Piaggio MP3?
I always thought the C1 was brilliant. Then again, I don’t ride a motorcycle.
I’ve always wanted a Peravez Monoracer. Enclosed motorcycle that could actually replace a car for a lot of things. I just wish they were about half the price they are.
For me these fall the same interest category as the Yamaha Tricity leaners. Which I think you should do an article on next!
These were so common in Asia and I always wanted one
Innovative but a failure! How dare you!
I am down with these things. Spruce these puppies up and lets do a re-release. Keep them at these low 20 year used prices though!