(first posted 12/5/2018) When I was a child, I used to read Noddy books. For those who aren’t familiar with the Enid Blyton character, Noddy was a little wooden boy who lived in Toyland with a friendly gnome named Big Ears. Noddy drove around Toyland in a little convertible with a big key sticking out the back. When I see the Daihatsu Copen, I can’t help but think of Noddy and his little convertible. All that’s missing is the key.
The Copen certainly was small enough for Toyland, using the Cuore mini-car’s platform and measuring just 133.7 inches long and 58.1 inches wide. This was a kei car and as such the standard engine in Japan was a 660cc DOHC turbocharged three-cylinder. The little three-pot produced 67 hp and 73 ft-lbs and could hit 60mph in under 12 seconds.
A few years after launch, export markets received a larger 1.3 naturally-aspirated four with 85 hp and 88 ft-lbs. This was enough to push the Copen’s 0-60 time to just under 10 seconds. No, that wasn’t terribly fast but it felt it in such a tiny little car, at least with the five-speed manual; a four-speed automatic was also offered in some markets.
I don’t think Noddy’s convertible had a folding roof – does it even rain in Toyland? – but the Copen had a slick aluminium retractable hardtop, highly unusual for a convertible this small.
The cabin was understandably small but curiously cheerless – the fun design motif didn’t carry over inside.
Because of its pert dimensions and low 1874-pound curb weight, the Copen was darty and fun-to-drive – perfect for running over Skittles (strange Toyland creatures that liked being bowled over by cars – Enid had quite an imagination!) The Copen’s short 87.8-inch wheelbase didn’t help ride quality however, the little convertible crashing over bumps.
The Copen had a short three-year run in Australia. Daihatsu was withdrawn from the Australian market in 2005 although Toyota denied this was to make way for a rumoured introduction of the Scion brand here. More likely it was the ongoing threat of small Korean cars and a rather unexciting product lineup, both of which had made the brand unprofitable here. The Copen was one of the few highlights in the Daihatsu range and it undercut the Mazda MX-5 by a cool $8000.
Elsewhere, the Copen enjoyed a lengthy decade-long run before being discontinued. This cute little convertible couldn’t stay gone for long, though. A new generation debuted at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show, sporting decidedly more aggressive styling more suitable to a car owned by mischievous goblins Sly and Gobbo. Fortunately, a variant called the Copen Cero arrived in 2015 to appeal to buyers that liked the first generation’s cute styling.
On the smooth roads and amidst the sunny climate of Toyland, the first-generation Copen would have been a treat for a diminutive driver. For everywhere else, it was just too small, noisy and uncomfortable. If you could get past those flaws, though, the Copen could put a smile on your face.
Related Reading:
Curbside Classic: 2003-05 Smart Roadster – Losing The Smart Money
Missed Out? 2003-05 Suzuki Twin – Cute ForTwo
Curbside Capsule: 1991-97 Suzuki Cappuccino – Hot Frothy Little Thing
I can’t say that I’m a fan. It carries too much of the shapelessness that turns me off from the Audi TT and the final 2 seat Thunderbird. The newer version seems to be an improvement.
I thought it WAS an Audi TT at first, especially in silver.
From the front it looks like a TT to me, from the rear a Thunderbird.
A TT that was in the dryer for too long.
Our standards of ‘mini’ have changed over the years. The Ford T was 133 inches long and weighed about 1500 pounds on average. It carried big families and their baggage.
Height is everything!
The Copens is too sophisticated-looking to be a Noddy car. This circa 1970 Vignale Gamine (based on a Fiat 500) is the real thing.
William, you might be the only person on CC who likes American cars and is a fan of (or even knows of) Noddy. While some British kids’ books crossed the Atlantic to the US (Wind in the Willows a long time ago, and Harry Potter more recently), I think Noddy remained a Commonwealth thing. I’m aware of him, growing up in an Anglophile family and living in the UK as a kid for a few years, but even I don’t think I’ve read any Enid Blyton. Edith Nesbit books (5 Children and It, Wouldn’t Be Goods) … yes. But, given the diversity in this group, I may be proven wrong.
Weird car, by the way. Shrunken Audi TT, but not in a good way, or shrunken Lexus SC, which I suppose is better, but not really good either.
Another Aussie here. I learnt to read from Enid Blyton books. Amazing this is she seemingly had a series to appeal to almost every childrens’ age group and interest. After Noddy I had some short-story collections of here, then graduated to the Five books (big jump, I know!), read my cousin’s Five and Seven series books (we only had a few titles in common), got all the Mystery series, then back-tracked to some older out-of-print titles I picked up at fetes and markets. All before I hit my teens.
Back to cars. There used to be a Copen at the hospital car park, often squeezed in to some impossibly-tiny spot, and I’ve seen one or two in passing. certainly a car that catches the eye of non-car folk; a convertible this size is so unusual.
German here, English mom and grandparents, very familiar with Noddy when I was a kid and I believe I have read practically everything Enid Blyton ever wrote as a pre-teen in both German and English AND then watched the TV series of at least the Famous Five (Fünf Freunde) when first run in Germany with overdubbing. I ran across them again on YouTube a few years ago, it was weird to hear the kids’ actual voices in English…. I really believe that is where my huge appreciation of late 70’s Fords such as the Granada and Taunus/Cortina comes from as they were used in the TV series (and concurrent book covers). I still have that entire series of books and have tried to get my own kids interested with limited success so far… )-:
The Copen was always mentioned as an obvious TT ripoff in the US when covered in the press here. Never sold here and it was hard to understand how much smaller it was until actually seeing one on a different continent.
“Poor little Noddy”…
Very odd car, but something I find interesting is that it hides its small size very well. The overall design makes it seem larger, and in photos like here, its tiny size is only betrayed by the license plate which seems proportionately very large.
His Master’s Voice Records…a British imprint, currently no relation to RCA. Yet both share the Nipper logo.
Fascinating history if you’re interested.
The Gramophone Company in England purchased the rights in 1899 from artist Francis Barraud. The Gramophone Company’s US affiliate became the Victor Talking Maching Company, which in turn was bought by RCA in 1929.
Two years later, RCA helped create EMI, who would retain the rights to Nipper in Great Britain since it would be the new steward of HMV. The RCA/EMI partnership ended in 1935.
JVC was spun from RCA when World War II broke out, JVC owns the rights to Nipper in Japan.
Technicolor SA owns the rights to Nipper today in the US, after GE owning it when they acquired RCA 32 years ago. And HMV is an entertainment retail company in the UK.
These cars actually look cute. I assume, given Kei Car laws in Japan, they aren’t much different in size than a Subaru 360. If they were a bit bigger, I could see them giving the Miata a run for their money.
I bought a whole stack of Edison records from the early 1900’s, but found I couldn’t play them on my Newcomb record player! You have to have some kind of special diamond needle for the sound to be heard properly.
I think you may have it backwards. In my experience those old 78 rpm records used a softer needle. The diamond needles were for the newer LPs with much tighter grooves. The really old machines used steel needles that had to be replaced fairly regularly.
Collectors will not play old records on vintage equipment because the tone arms put so much weight on the needle. Modern equipment with a very lightweight tone arm and an appropriately wide needle will not wear the records out like the old machines did.
Are the Edison disks you refer to the ones with the larger than average hole and that are maybe 2 or 3 times the thickness of a standard 78 rpm shellac disc? They made up for being extra thick by having a recording on only a single side. 🙂
I have some old ones but no Edisons.
Here’s the details on how to play 78s, from http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_6.html
Cartridge/Styli:
With a suitable turntable, the next item to consider is the cartidge/stylus. Ordinary hi-fi types are not really ideal for the harsh condition of 78 playback. High surface speeds and recorded velocities, warped and badly centred records and heavier playing weights all conspire to upset delicate stylus systems.
Suitable cartridges are the Shure SC35, Shure M44, Stanton 500 series and Ortofon Pro range. All are very reasonably priced, and come with an LP stylus which can be re-tipped by specialist companies with a 78 type. 78 styli have a tip that is much broader than that used for LPs. All of these will track happily at 4/5 grams, the optimum weight given the groove-wall geometry/dynamics of the 78.
Ideally you will need more than one stylus type. This is because standardisation of groove dimensions did not happen until around the 1940s. To comprehensively cover the entire range from 1900 to 1940, you would need styli with tip radii of between .0018″ and .0040″ with probably something like 10 or more variations in between. However, to play most records well you don’t need more than two. The most useful are .0032 and .0028″. The .0032″ will give good results on most HMV/Victor recordings from the period 1905 to 1940. The .0028″ will give better reproduction on most Columbia, Parlophone and Odeon for the same period as well as being good for pre-revolutionary Russian HMVs. Remember, there are no fixed rules. If you have a range of styli, experiment to find out which sounds the best: if it sounds right, it is right!
For those with larger budgets, a greater range of styli will be an advantage although the differences in many cases will not be great. Quite a few early G & Ts and some Fonotipias do best with much smaller styli such as .0018″ or .0021″. A number of Odeons from the early electrical era will give a lower surface noise with a .0030″ as compared with a .0028″.
These special styli can be obtained from the Expert Stylus Co.
I just use one of these. Solid timber cabinet, BSR Monarch changer.
It´s great to see the Copen being featured. The Noddy reference is not very accurate though and with respect, a little bit of a clichée. Getting past that, here we have a fun and usefully sized small car well suited to narrow roads in much of rural Europe. It isn´t fast, but it is entertaining and probably more enjoyable than a Corvette at top speed on the A5. Small´s beautiful.
Neat! Looks like an Audi TT had a baby with a Suzuki X90
I read Enid Blyton as a child, didnt everyone?I remember her books got a bad name at one point over the Gollywog character.
I havent seen a Copen in a long time, I’d forgotten them, though I do remember seeing them in Australia, there must be some here in NZ it would be unusual if there arent any at all every Japanese oddball has washed up here over time and with the sunny climate where I currently live there should be some here.
Strangely, Copen was officially sold in Germany from 2003 to 2005 in right-hand-drive form and with tiny 650cc engine.
For 2006 model year until it was withdrawn from the German market in 2011, Copen had a proper left-hand-drive system and new engine twice the size of original Kei engine.
The new ones also get turned into Nissan GTR lookalikes…
.
One of these would make a good companion to my xB.
At your height, one of these would make a good ornament.
Big-eyed Noddy gave me the heebie-jeebies as a kid (let alone his weird-ass mate with his huge ears flapping in the breeze), and anyway, I found his world about as interesting as some other kid’s imaginary toy world (rubbish compared to my own ofcourse). And I’d swear I remember thinking his car looked like a cheap toy – he didn’t even fit! – though memories of so long ago are as much a fractured re-creation as a reliable source now.
I read the Magic Faraway Tree and all those illustrated Famous Five and Secret Seven books when a bit older, and I’ll confess I loved their neat Technicoloured rural English-idyll setting, but they had such short-lived appeal. And not a car anywhere to help. There was an utterly wonderful spoof of the books called Five Go Mad In Dorset, made by Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French (AbFab, etc),and Adrian Edmonson (Vivyan Basterd in The Young Ones) in the mid-’80’s. The books are unreadable once you’ve seen it.
The open Copen looked like a dainty shoe (and incidentally, “open Copen” sounds like some obscure Danish brand of what could be a shoe, does it not?). But closed, the dopey-faced thing looked to this Aussie much less like a knock-off of an expensive German brand’s Bauhaus re-invention than it did Strop the Bondi Surf Lifesaver with his rubber cap pulled back tight over his little head.
I don’t remember much about Noddy when I was a kid, had a couple of Famous Five books.
The one I remember most was the Billy Bunter books, me growing up on a farm reading about the English boys boarding school world was fascinating, the writer used the word “ejaculated” a lot, but not in the way most know it today.
Trying to read it today is hilarious but also sort of unreadable if that makes sense !
I’d never heard of Enid Blyton until she showed up in a recent NYT Crossword. My first book of children’s stories, a gift from an aunt in my first year that I still have in its original box, contains a story about a anthropomorphized “wrecked/injured” car brought back to health by two young guys who then drive it to sunny California for a better life. I still know it by heart. Amazing how impacted we can be by childhood reading☺.
Ca Guy :
You’re _SO_ right about childhood reading ! yesterday I read a book from 1962 “A Wrinkle In Time” that apparently Disney made into a movie in 2007, I remember the book very well from my awful 50’s & 60’s childhood, the main thrust of the book was ‘it’s okay to be different / your self’ .
-Nate
I’ve had a Copen as my open weekend car for a few years. Just like in Germany, here in the Netherlands Daihatsu initially imported the Japanese original with RHD and tiny turbo engine, later switching to a more “European” version. Mine was one of the originals (2004).
This rare small car used to get lots of attention (of all kinds) and it really was a hoot to drive on narrow roads with lots of bends, such as our Dutch river dykes. Unfortunately with the top down it did not leave you with space for luggage larger than a briefcase (no real space behind the seats, either). Also, when going over a speed bump a bit too fast, it felt like it tried to launch you into outer space. And finally, when you tried to get the most from the tiny engine, the turbo tended to overheat a little: so when parking, you often had to keep it running stationary for a few minutes to allow some time for the turbo to cool down properly.
After a couple of years I traded it in for a more comfortable alternative, but still I remember my quirky Copen with affection.
It’s -SO- cute ! .
I can handle the noise & stiff ride, I wonder if I’d fit into it .
-Nate
Muuhaha! Audi TT reduced to the max !?
Some years ago CAR Magazine’s “Good, Bad, and Ugly” sectioned termed a certain car, I can’t remember which one, a Noddy car. I don’t think it was meant as a compliment.