HOW many owners of BMWs know what the letters stand for?
I asked AI and the answer is ‘a significant portion — potentially a majority of modern BMW drivers — are not car enthusiasts and may not know the brand’s origin.’
Those familiar with the German brand, founded in 1916, are well aware that BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke — or Bavarian Motor Works in English.
So good luck with FSM. It’s the Polish company that made the Niki.
A handful of the minicars may still be around somewhere, although the brand quickly disappeared from Australian roads and showrooms in the early 1990s, after arriving circa 1989.
The letters stood for Fabryka Samochodow Malolitrazowych and the Niki was a poor reincarnation of the Italian Fiat 126, which in the previous decade became a cultural icon and gave joy to close on five million owners.
The FSM Niki had a noisy 652cc two-cylinder air-cooled engine that produced 18kW and 41Nm, so performance was a nonentity.
I had one on review at the time and recall tucking in behind a 10-tonne truck on the freeway, hoping to get a ‘tow’ from its draft.
But it steadily pulled away, leaving the Niki to fend for itself with its dismal performance.
Top speed might have been as much as 110km/h, provided there was no headwind and I gave up using a stopwatch to record its zero to 100km/h acceleration, which I reckoned would have taken from Monday to Thursday.
It cost close on $8000 at the time.
It was the cheapest car in Australia at the time and came with a teddy bear as part of a marketing promotion to make the Niki appealing to families and first-time car buyers.
Bizarrely, a few much-modified Nikis have since appeared online, some highly modified with Abarth or Yamaha power — and one was spotted at a dragstrip somewhere overseas with a great supercharged V8 mounted in its nose.
About 30 years earlier another Polish compact car, called the Smyk B30, made a brief appearance in Warsaw.
It was designed in 1957 at the nation’s Automotive Industry Design Office and the plan was for it to provide affordable transport for two adults and a couple of children in the post-WWII era.
Built by a team of government engineers, it appeared to have been inspired by the BMW Isetta, which had a fridge-like door in front.
It was hinged on the left side.
The Smyk version, though, came with the hinge at the bottom, so the door leant forward and you had to step through the gap to enter the car.
The car looked neat, but that weird door was far from practical.
Nor was there a chassis. Instead, it used a self-supporting body and power was from the Polish Junak 350cc motorcycle.
The gearbox was a four-speed unit with reverse – for both forward and reverse travel.
Yes, you could change from first through to fourth in reverse!
There was a lot of pressure to get the car to market and the rush resulted in numerous design and production flaws.
As a result, work on the Smyk B30 was suspended in 1959 and only 17 prototypes were built before the Government decided to switch the effort to more conventional compact for the car-starved public.
That was the Mikrus MR-300, which didn’t fare much better.
It was assembled in spare production capacity by aerospace manufacturers WSK Mielec and WSK Rzeszów and only 1728 were produced.
The Mikrus had a mass of just 472kg and its twin-cylinder 296cc engine gave it a top speed of 90km/h (56 mph).
The Mikrus MR-300 lasted just three years, from 1957 to 1960.
One of them ended up at the Cayman Island Motor Museum Collection and fetched US$4400 at auction, where it was described as ‘a Polish microcar with body by aerospace manufacturer WSK Mielec and engine by WSK Rzeszow.
- Finished in grey with a black and red interior
- Powered by a 296-cc two-stroke two-cylinder engine paired with a manual transmission
- An interesting piece of history as one of the few cars ever to be manufactured in Poland
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