I bet you'd have one nice beefy arm after using a Kommisbrot to commute to work for a year or so. And, if you made a mistake and left the ignition on while you pumped that lever, the car could backfire and break your arm, too. Batteries and starter motors are glorious things, my friends.

Advertisement

The styling of the Kommisbrot is mostly determined by the minimum envelope that can be used to enclose you and the engine behind you. As a result, it's actually quite clean and pleasing-looking, I think. It forward-thinking as the fenders are mostly integrated into the whole body (hardly done in the 20s) and the underbelly is surprisingly smooth.

Advertisement

Cost-cutting ideas are all over this thing like ants on my groin that time I spilled all that honey mustard sauce on my pants. There's just one door, on the passenger side, the tiny, fragile wiper is run by an equally tiny, fragile hand crank (maybe you could train a chipmunk to run it for you) and the car normally only came with that one cyclopean headlight.

Advertisement

This thing was definitely one of the cheapest cars you could buy at the time, which is partially why they managed to sell almost 16,000 of these — not a bad number. I bet it also helped that a Kommisbrot would get you about 60 MPG, too, even if you couldn't go more than 40 MPH or so.

Advertisement

This 2/10 had a couple of optional niceties, like a pair of extra headlights, a little rack for luggage over the engine bay, and a shelf by your knees for your 1920s mechanical laptop bag.

Advertisement

I was very, very eager to drive this crude and charming little car. Getting in, you quickly realize that the standard car controls we now take for granted weren't so set in stone back in 1926 Germany. The Hanomag's pedals are in this order: clutch, gas, brake. That means an awful lot of muscle memory is going to be fighting me in this little run.

Advertisement

The gearshift is to the right, up against the side of the car, and one of a pair of strange metal rods with wire loops on them. One's the parking brake, and one's the gearshift. The loop is the reverse lockout. You can see the gear shifting mechanism itself right there in a hole in the floor, and it sort of helps you understand how to move the lever.

It's a reverse-H pattern 3 speed, with first to the top right. So, let's look at what we have here before I set off: different pedal pattern, shifter on the wrong side and with a mirror-image pattern, shifted with a funny, spindly Victorian Mechanical-Man penis, complete with wire Prince Albert. This should be fun.

Advertisement

And, you know what? It was.

The Hanomag is, above everything else, a light little car. I'm not exactly sure what it weighs, but I bet it's got to be under 1500 lbs, easy. Despite having just a lone, friendless cylinder and only barely enough horses, if they were Jewish, to form a minyan, it never felt sluggish.

Advertisement

Granted, I was only able to drive it around the Lane's parking lot (you can see part of the drive above), but I found it to be willing, light and direct to steer, and pretty agile. It was fun, in a simple-open machine sort of way.

Advertisement

I've seen pictures of people like Beetle-design pioneer Josef Ganz driving a Kommisbrot in the Alps, and that picture amazes me for two reasons: first, it suggests a direct connection of ideas from this little Hanomag to the man who would prove so influential in the designs that led to the Beetle, and second, holy fuck, what kind of balls would it take to drive this little bathtub in the winter, up a mountain, in the snow.

Advertisement

Clearly, it was possible to drive a Kommisbrot in ways and conditions that would make all of our modern pampered asses sob like cake-deprived toddlers. And that, too, makes it feel like a true Beetle ancestor — it was a modest little machine that, with a bit of owner determination, was capable of far more than anyone had any right to expect.

When the nice, clever technician at the Lane who started the 2/10 for me heard me talking about how much I liked driving it, he gave me a withering look of pity that one normally reserves for someone who insists that a plate of dead earthworms really is a pretty good substitute for fettuccine alfredo, in a pinch.

Advertisement

But I don't care. I thought this ancient little econoloaf was an absolutely delightful ride, and I'm still delighted I got a chance to drive one. The perspective I gained on the later Beetle — and, really, all super-affordable cars, even today — was wildly valuable.

Advertisement

It's the best damn loaf of bread I've ever driven.