Hello, friends! Welcome to a new series where I’ll try to make you feel inspired with a photograph of the inside of a trunk! I’m so sick of being inspired and uplifted by sunsets and lighthouses and soaring asshole birds. Enough already. Let’s get inspired within the dark, dank confines of a car trunk. Trunkward ho!
Our first inspirational trunk comes thanks to Raph reminding me how much I like the humble Fiat 126. The 126 has a small, tortured front trunk. The one up top there. What’s the inspirational message of this sad, little trunk? Never give up.
If, somehow, you look at that picture of a Fiat 126 trunk and don’t immediately feel a surge of powerful determination to achieve your goals, let me explain a bit. Now, I should be clear, I don’t actually know if Fiat 126 designer Sergio Sartorelli (who also designed the handsome VW Type III Ghia) actually thought any of these things, so I’m extrapolating from the trunk itself here. So bear with me.
Look at the inside of that little trunk. It’s usable, but it’s pretty irregular, and there’s a lot of non-stowage stuff crammed in there — spare tire, brake master cylinder, headlight buckets, washer fluid reservoirs, and a bunch of oddly shaped protrusions and lumps. What you’re looking at here is a battlefield. On this battlefield was fought a grand, brutal fight to force the existence of a trunk in an area that didn’t ever want one.
But Sergio clearly wanted one. He knew this little economy car to replace the venerable Fiat 500 had to have some sort of storage area, and he would not give up until it did. It would have been so easy to give up — other rear-engine designs, successful ones like the Subaru 360, and even the more recent Tata Nano, the new Renault Twingo, and the Smart Car have abandoned the difficult task of making a viable front trunk in the tiny, cluttered front end of a small economy car. They gave it a look, but found the task too daunting, and just gave up, relinquishing that precious inner-nose real estate to the cruel necessaries of spare tire, gas tank, and various reservoirs.
But Sergio Sartorelli wasn’t some candy-ass who gives up just because the job is hard. Sergio packaged and repackaged, shuffled and crammed and tetrised bits of hardware around until he was able to enclose an open volume big enough to actually be useful. I’m sure he had a steely look in his eye when he ordered the interior department to cut him a rubber trunk liner that looked like a map of a fjord, and felt a swell of accomplishment when he crammed that first overnight duffel bag in the trunk and felt the latch click shut, that click as loud as cannonfire announcing Sergio’s victory over packaging.
The Fiat 126 has a trunk. It’s not big, but you can use it. And every time a bag gets packed into that trunk, it’s a victory. A victory for all people who are willing to just keep trying, to keep rearranging, waiting for that inspired spark that lets them get that fucking trunk.
I hope you all can get your tiny trunks in the front end of the rear-engined econobox microcars of your goals.