Bobby-Car Classic

The Bobby-Car Classic is a small red car for children of one year and up, without pedals. Its body is a single hollow shell of blow-moulded polyethylene, swelling into rounded wings over four black wheels with white-walled rims. The seat is a hollow in the back, the rider straddles it like a motorcycle, and a large white steering wheel on a short column turns the front wheels. Two round eyes serve as headlamps, and the name runs along each flank.

It was the idea of Ernst A. Bettag, who in 1956 had taken over a tinplate toy factory in Fürth, near Nuremberg, and turned it over to plastics. He modelled the car with the wood sculptor Christian Meyer and, by his own account, was unimpressed with the result. The car was shown at the Nuremberg Toy Fair in 1972. The name, BIG's later managing director has said, was simply an English-sounding word of its time that alliterated with the maker's.

Sales began slowly, then ran into millions, with orthopaedists commending the posture it encouraged in children learning to walk. By its fiftieth year more than 20 million had been sold, and it is often described as the best-selling children's vehicle in the world. It also acquired an adult afterlife: from the 1990s, reinforced Bobby-Cars have raced down closed mountain roads, and one has passed 130 kilometres an hour.

The car has survived the fire that destroyed BIG's Fürth works in 1998, its founder's death in 2003 and the company's sale to the Simba Dickie Group in 2004. BIG added a restyled range in 2005 and makes the Classic in many colours and licensed liveries, but the red original remains in the catalogue. Its steering wheel is a little straighter and its wheels now rubber-covered; the body, Wikipedia says, is exactly the same.