14 Dec 06
Heinkel He111
Heinkel, established in 1922 by former Nansa-Brandenburg engineer Ernst Heinkel, is usually associated with the planes it built for the German Luftwaffe, though it also built mail planes and passenger airliners for the Lufthansa airline prior to World War II. The He70 and He111 bombers were important members of the Luftwaffe fleet, however, as was the He219 fighter. Teaming up with engine-maker Hirth in 1941 to create fully in-house operations, Heinkel-Hirth went on to develop a jet fighter, the He280 prototype, though this did not see production; the successive He162 jet was too late to enter service to any degree before the end of the war.
Heinkel battled against arch-rival Messerschmitt for many Luftwaffe contracts, and like Messerschmitt, it found itself in a perilous position post-war with all aircraft-building activity banned in Germany. It tapped into the need for cheap, economical personal transport instead, building around 170,000 scooters between 1953-64 at its Speyer factory, and around 27,000 microcars (1955-64). The bubble cars - tiny two-seaters with a front-opening windscreen/door - were mostly three-wheelers, with two wheels up front and one to the rear, though a handful of four-wheeled examples were made, and there were even a few vans and convertibles.
Heinkel He280
The Heinkel microcar was eventually built in Germany, Argentina, Ireland and England. It came with Heinkel's own 175cc and 200cc engines, giving up to 10bhp. In the UK, the sole concessionaires were Noble Motors Ltd of Piccadilly, London, who sold the microcar for £398, 15s; according to the Heinkel-Trojan UK owners' club, around 20 a month were imported from Germany, but after petrol prices rose in the wake of the Suez crisis five a day were flown in from Hanover to Croydon airport to meet demand prior to the moving of production in Dundalk, Ireland in late 1958. The car's popularity was boosted by its reduced rate of road tax (£5 a year, compared to £12 10s for a normal car), and by the fact that it could be driven on a provisional or motorcycle licence.
The Dundalk factory produced the van and convertible prototypes, as well as exporting cars to Sweden. English production started later, in 1961, when a firm called Trojan - a partner to scooter-maker Lambretta - bought the worldwide marketing rights to the car, the production line, 100 complete cars and 2,674 parts kits. Its factory in Purley Way, Croydon, made right-hand drive cars, sold under the brand name of Trojan in the UK (avoiding the use of a name associated with German war-planes), but by the mid-1960s the microcars were uncompetitive against the revolutionary Mini and its followers, and production ended in summer 1964. Meanwhile, Heinkel had turned its production lines back to aircraft in the mid-1950s, building Lockheed F-104 Starfighters under licence for the re-established Luftwaffe (West German). It was bought by VFW (the firm formed by a merger of Focke-Wulf and Weserflug) in 1965, which then in turn teamed up with Heinkel's old adversary, Messerschmitt, in 1980; the conglomerate has since been absorbed into DASA (1989) and is now part of EADS (see DaimlerChrysler).
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