What an unkind name for these poor little cars!
You have to remember just how austere times were back in the early 1950s, and there were plenty of optimists who thought people were going to be looking for something very very simple and cheap to run - anything just to get them mobile. Hence the plethora of bubble cars and microcars, without which the world would be a very much poorer place for us AutoPuzzlers!
All of them, almost without exception, were undriveable crap!
There are still these optimists around, but now they all think they can make a 300 mph supercar...