Short Post: The 1951 Hoffmann Wikipedia article or, "Notable only because of a YouTube video."

From about 1947 to the early 1960s a large number of designers attempted to build budget microcars in Europe, at first to create a market in places like occupied Western Germany or ration-book-run Britain, and then later to get young-ish people in three-wheeled cars that were legally considered "specialized motorcycles" and thus could be licensed for little to nothing. Many designs never made it further than a couple of prototypes, or low-scale serial production (under 10,000 units sold.) The "Type I" VW Beetle, the Citroën 2CV, the Austin Mini, and the Fiat 500 and 600 all did their part to keep the concept fringe in Western Europe, though the microcar has had a long life in Japan. Which brings us to the Hoffmann.

                              Photos from Lane Motor Museum site, present owners of the Hoffmann.

Literally, the 1951 Hoffmann is a one-off, utterly unique car built by a Munich shop foreman named Michael Hoffmann using junkyard bits and hardware-store parts. The 6 hp motor is out of a prewar Goliath Pioneer, the front end might be from any number of German cars, the manual gearbox is sequential and not even on a tree. The car is very circular because, like a forklift, all steering is done from the rear, and the two-cycle Pioneer motor is mounted to the single rear wheel (which it chain-drives) by a complicated frame, which swings on a large kingpin in the center of the cabin. The wide track of the front wheels mixed with the short rear wheelbase means it doesn't like driving in straight lines unless you correct it constantly. The estimated top speed might be around 28 mph - nobody has taken it out to an empty go-cart track to see just what it can do. Possibly the chance of the cable brakes failing dissuades any test drivers. It is a cramped car with no noise reduction and the restorer (Gottfried Gerhäuser, who did the work in 1996) replaced the bench seat with bucket seats to give the driver and passenger more room for entry and exit over the wide door sills and around the wheel humps. I will say this in its favor - the aluminum body was well-hammered though the actual design definitely needed more work (yes, the front windows are asymmetrical.) Hoffman spent 1949 through 1951 building this vehicle, and it is unknown to us if this was a prototype car for the market, or the ultimate weekend project.

In early October of 2015 Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik went to the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville and drove the 1951 Hoffmann for a YouTube video (plus an article)  and that is what woke up Wikipedia to existence of the car - their article on it is little more than a long stub which first appeared on October 16th, 11 days after the Torchinsky article. It gets longer as an article, but like the Hoffmann itself, it never really improves - the body of it is a series of bullet points:

The car is notable for its plethora of unconventional and often user-hostile design elements.^[3] These include:

• Windows that are raised or lowered with a strap that the user pulls, and held in place with eyelets and pegs
• Suicide doors and a driving position that make ingress and egress extremely difficult
• A starter awkwardly placed by the driver's right hip
• A fuel filler tube which goes from the roof, directly through the cabin of the car
• Front wheels that are farther apart than the length of the wheelbase
• A linear rather than H-shaped shift pattern with a neutral between each gear
• The rear wheel is placed immediately behind the driver, with a large portion of the car behind it
• Rear-wheel steering
• The combination of the previous two features mean that the car has an extremely high tendency to slew.
• An engine located on the same pivot as the rear wheel steering mechanism, so that the engine moves with the wheel when the car is steered
• Rearview mirrors positioned so that they are perfectly blocked by the A-pillar
• Two-stroke engine, which requires engine oil to be continuously mixed into the fuel supply
• Single-cylinder engine, which causes greater vibration than multi-cylinder engines
• Rear-mounted engine that is dependent on air cooling, but the lack of a fan causes overheating when idling

This is a lot of what Jason Torchinsky said with the humor removed. That little introductory paragraph at the top of this blog post which tries to put the Hoffman into historical context is utterly missing. It gets worse that scrapers have taken this stub article and Torchinsky's article and concocted odd articles out of it (that author "675LT_ftw" somehow believes the original VW Beetle and Goliath Pioneer were "Communist Car(s) of the Year" says a lot about online gearhead knowledge of history, or he is a 'bot.) According to the Talk pages, the Hoffmann article is one of the "Low-importance Germany articles", of which there are 62,878 pages (some of the articles are listed under multiple WikiProjects; 1972 in Germany is part of the three WikiProjects Lists, Germany, and Years. It is only considered "mid-important" to the WikiProject Years people.) Despite all of this alleged organization, the Hoffmann was not found while looking through a book a decade ago and a stub article written, awaiting any possible expansion - instead the existence of a 64-year-old car had to be revealed by a guy driving it as a lark.

Wikipedia no longer leads, it follows.

Update: A pointless complication explains some of the confusion.

It turns out that there were two people in West Germany involved in microcars around the 1950s, our Michael Hoffmann and the small industrialist Jakob Oswald Hoffmann (1896-1972), whose existence confused the 1951 Hoffmann Talk page people. The other Hoffmann had built bicycles before World War II for Solinger, then continued manufacturing bicycles in a new plant in 1946 (the old bicycle factory was bombed during the war). J.O. Hoffmann "somehow" was able to keep a factory going when sourcing raw material was very hard, and by 1948 he was building DKW motorcycles under license, a year later he got into manufacturing Vespa motor scooters under license from Piaggio in Italy. What changed everything was the also-Italian Iso Isetta microcar in 1954; Hoffman had lost his Vespa license for building a version with a engine larger and more powerful than what the license specified, and he pressed his luck again by building a clone of the Isetta that was slightly longer and had side doors instead of a nose door (defeating the Isetta's reason for the weird door placement, the ability to park in spots where a small car would be hemmed in on both sides.) Hoffmann had asked Iso for an Isetta license and had been turned down, in turn Iso and BMW (who was going to introduce the Isetta to West Germany) crushed Hoffmann legally over his clone, the "Auto-Kabine" (only 113 units built.) J.O. Hoffmann only rolled the dice on his Isetta clone because he was in deep over a direct-drive motorcycle called the Gouverneur and the development and manufacture of his own 250cc motors - the lawsuit and the debts sank his firm, though he later became a parts supplier for Karmann the coachbuilder. Of course this story is more complicated than this simple outline; there were a lot more legal issues Hoffmann skirted around because Europe wasn't in a common market, that BMW was trying to get their act together with the Isetta after postwar reorganization and Hoffman's car and motorcycle were real competitors, etc. Click on the "clone of the Isetta" link for the full story.

Where this comes into WikiLand are the scrapers, mainly this article from Hagerty, the car-collector's website, which confuses Jakob Oswald Hoffmann with Michael Hoffmann, even though the former lived in Düsseldorf and the latter in Munich, roughly 382 miles apart (615.5 km). Once again it boils down to not checking outside, non-online sources and doing the minimal research. This is why things like this and the Yuri Gadyukin hoax can quietly exist online for years because nobody is checking, and everybody seems to think that 'bots "gnoming" things is a substitute for human intelligence (which it plainly isn't.)