The 1912 standards were a bit dated by the late 20s/early 30s. But even if the weights are doubled you still end up with under 1500 pounds (well, just over @ 1544 on the "large" class). I think under 1500 pounds and motorcycle type components (such as wheels/tires) and engines would be a more realistic definition for now. The one above (772 lb max) is still the "traditional" definition though. Many of the cars in this thread therefore aren't true cycle cars, but micro or mini cars (real small cars). The MG Midget is just over 1500 lbs (1620), and most of us know how small they are! The Austin 7 is an anomaly, it's built and looks like a "normal" car of the time, but is cycle car weight. I never considered the Frazer Nash a cycle car even though it does have that unusual transmission. It's just too big! But then the Austin 7 fits the bill weight and size wise, but was never considered a cycle car. A quote from the Wikipedia article on the Austin 7: "...within a few years the "big car in miniature" had wiped out the cyclecar industry..." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_7). I guess it wasn't considered a cycle car due more to the design more than size and weight. Speaking of Wikipedia... go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_car. There is a list of all the cycle car makes and links to articles with photos on most. The guy wanting to make a replica might find something there.
The bigger and smaller cyclecars really have different sorts of character. The smaller ones have all the weirdness of engineering; trying to do things in ways that seem too simple (and probably are!) but are all the more fascinating for it: belt drives, wooden chassis, air-cooled single- and twin-cylinder engines, tandem layouts, even centre-pivot steering. The larger cyclecars were steadily becoming fully-fledged motor-cars in miniature, and the best of them were exquisite in their tiny perfection. Both kinds appeal to me immensely, but in vastly different ways. Accordingly they set up completely different creative processes in me. If I think of something Amilcar-esque it's a modern liquid-cooled motorbike four and unit six-speed gearbox, and it's all about proportion and tidy detailing; if I think in Bedelia terms I'm likely to start wondering if one could get it to be passive-tilting, and the weirdness starts piling on.
A passive tilting bedelia.... I can see how it would be done with control rods coming off the center-pivot steering to work the bell cranks. The back end might be tricky though.... Maybe a single transverse leaf on the back like those W-Body GM cars from the 1980s? Put it on a dampened pivot maybe? You are an evil man for pointing my brain in this direction, but it's a good sort of evil.
Passive tilting like a bicycle can be done by configuring the axle as a parallelogram with hinged corners, rotating about a raked headstock. The rear could be trailing arms sprung by a centre-pivoting transverse leaf. Rear damping could be via lever-arm dampers with the relevant chambers interconnected with hydraulic lines.
Did the Europeans consider cars the size of Ford Model N's or T's and Curved dash Oldsmobiles to be "cycle cars"?
The Oldsmobile was very Edwardian in concept and rather predated the cyclecar phenomenon, in years but more in spirit. Both those Fords are considerably larger and heavier than cyclecars. More importantly cyclecars always had a small-production character, a sort of fabricated-from-scratchness that was absent even in the earliest series-production cars.
The Ford N and Curved Dash Olds almost fit the size and weight description, just like the Austin 7. As Ned said, those predate the cycle cars though. Some Ts, especially the early two passenger models, are darned close too! That's where the distinction between cycle cars and "real" cars blur -- the Model T and Austin 7 are both considered "real" or "regular" cars but are close to the "heavy" cycle car definition. Neither are as primitive (or should I say simple?) as the early cycle cars though. Later "large" cycle cars like the last Morgan three wheelers are just as (if not more) "sophisticated" as the Ford T and Austin 7 though.
The Model N's engine displacement was over twice the upper end of the cyclecar range, though. It must be pointed out that the Morgan three-wheeler was very much a cyclecar by accident, rather than a definitive or seminal type. It was first associated with the cyclecar movement when it was first raced (and the rest, admittedly, is history).
Why does nobody advertise cars like this anymore?! There's more passion in this one drawing than in any swish television campaign. And have 20-odd pages gone missing, I've been out of touch for a little while . . .
Those DFPs (and many others on here!) are really just small cars (for the day... remember, even a Model T Ford was "small" by today's standards, probably "average" for the mass produced cars of the day...).
It occurred to me a while ago that one didn't really get the situation where the same manufacturer made a cyclecar proper and a conventional car, at the same time. Cyclecar manufacturers generally only made cyclecars. Another thing is that the breadth of the car size spectrum has been narrowing. In the early days big cars were really really big, and small ones were very small indeed. The shift has since been to uniformity in size as in pretty much everything else.
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