Bugatti made headlines earlier this summer by revealing the French hypercar manufacturer’s cheapest model, which will cost approximately 5% as much as any Chiron, Divo, or limited edition thereof.
While gearheads might have clicked on those headlines immediately, hoping to get their hands on such a miraculous product, there is a catch: the car is a 75% scale, electrified replica of the 1924 Bugatti Type 35.
Mere months later, Aston Martin also unveiled a miniature, electrified version of perhaps the world’s most famous film car, the DB5. So, what’s going on here?
Well, it turns out the Bugatti Baby II and the Aston Martin DB5 Junior both come courtesy of The Little Car Company, a new firm operating out of the UK.
I recently got a chance to speak with TLCC’s CEO Ben Hedley about the little cars, their iconic forebears, and what’s on deck after these two enormous debuts.
A Speed Freak With Big Dreams
As CEO of The Little Car Company (TLCC), Hedley is an entrepreneur at heart—but he wanted to make very clear that he’s not just some businessman looking to make a buck. A self-proclaimed “petrolhead and speed freak,” Hedley studied automotive manufacturing at Cambridge University and wrote his dissertation studying sports cars.
By age 30, he had bought a pair of skis on Ebay, joined the British Ski Team, and was ranked eighth in the world before breaking his neck in a crash at 115 miles per hour.
Obviously, this is a guy who follows his passions. Other business ventures along the way have included a lawncare company, the carbon-offset enterprise Clear, and The Expert Academy, which offers online learning a la Masterclass. But Hedley’s passion for cars re-emerged when he founded Pocket Classics, which led him in the direction of The Little Car Company (along with a little nudge from Bugatti).
Baby Beginnings At The Geneva Motor Show
The Baby II’s story begins in October 2018, as Bugatti was approaching its 110th anniversary. The established French automaker (and Volkswagen AG subsidiary) approached Hedley with the idea to build a miniature car for the 2019 Geneva Motor Show.
The one-of-one Voiture Noire was already underway but Bugatti gave Hedley free license, and he said they “wanted something a bit fun."
He told me, “We started with a blank sheet of paper. Rather than remake the original Baby, which was too small for an eight-year-old, I had this idea to do something that brought parents and children together, to drive together.”
The resulting Baby II emerged for pre-orders more than a full year later, but the early days sound like they were pretty touch-and-go. As is common with big companies, Hedley said that getting the paperwork and contracts finalized took until March of 2019—and Geneva was fast approaching.
As he tells the story: “I said we’ll do a really nice image or we’ll do something clever with the lights to show the profile. And they said, ‘Oh no, no, no, we’d like a car on the stand.’ And I said, ‘That’s 22 days away.’ To which they said, ‘Yeah.’”
With only 22 days to build a full-scale miniature of the Type 35, Hedley says his team “...Did a phenomenal job. We 3D-printed a plastic model, painted it, sprayed it. The night before, I was there at, I think, 4 o’clock in the morning screwing bits of the model together. Longest 22 days of my life, that was.”
This Is Not A Toy
But don’t make the mistake of thinking the Bugatti Baby II is some kind of toy. Sure, it’s based on a car that Ettore Bugatti built for his son on his fourth birthday back in 1926. And yes, it’s built to three-quarters scale. But as Hedley says, “This is a gearhead car, it’s definitely not a toy. In the UK and in the EU, we can’t market it as a toy because it’s got a 48-volt powertrain and therefore it’s classified as 14 years of age and above.”
And no toy on the market can come close to the level of detail and performance on offer by TLCC’s products. Hedley’s goal from the beginning was to “Take these amazing shapes from the past, that sometimes are too expensive to drive because you don’t want to put miles on it... start knocking value off or you worry about damaging it,” and reintroduce them to the public.
He wasn’t looking to build “...Some of these little, cheap, ghastly toy cars that you can drive around... We wanted to show that EVs can be fun.”
The Little Details Add Up
For the Baby II, that commitment to authenticity meant taking a deep dive into the original Type 35’s design and engineering.
“We actually got ahold of a Type 35,” Hedley explained, “One of the original ones. And we 3D-scanned every single component. I think it was a 1924 Lyon GP car in a museum in the UK.”
That car would be the first Type 35 ever to debut in Formula 1, setting the stage for what would become Bugatti’s most successful racecar of all time and arguably, the most successful from any manufacturer ever.
With an electric drivetrain swap, the Baby II’s engine bay became legroom, so Hedley’s team quickly dropped the straight-eight, focusing on hardpoints like the front axle and replicating everything down to nuts and bolts.
Throughout the entire process, he said, “It was really important that it handled like an original Bugatti.”
At this point, I paused the conversation. After all, who’s going to take out an original Type 35 and push one of the world’s most valuable collector cars to the limits of traction—all to verify that an electric miniature version drives the same?
Calling Up Andy Wallace, Bugatti Test Driver
That part was easy, Hedley said. He just got ahold of Andy Wallace, an ex-Formula 1 and Le Mans driver, and the guy who set the McLaren F1’s top speed record back in the 1990s. More recently, Wallace piloted Bugatti’s own Chiron past the 300-mile-per-hour mark to set a new world record in 2019.
As Hedley describes Wallace, “He drives the Bugatti Type 35 in France—all the time.” (Side note: if that’s not a gearhead’s dream, what is?)
Hedley continued, describing how Wallace took the Baby II out for spirited testing and came back with immediate notes, “He said, ‘Yeah, it handles like the Type 35. But you’ve got a problem with the throttle mapping.’ He was saying that at low throttle it’s good. High throttle, it’s good. But in the middle, it’s just non-linear.”
Nobody likes a non-linear powerband, least of all a guy who goes 115 miles per hour on skis, so Hedley told me the team, “...Went back and checked the mapping, it turns out he was dead right, there was a little curve in it. So we straightened it out and he gave it another go and said, ‘Yep, much better.’”
Little Tweaks From Old To New
The resulting Baby II is remarkably identical to the original Type 35, though certain changes had to be made. As an example, the original’s chassis was box-section steel, while the Baby II uses C-section. It’s also got the famous “Top Speed Key” that debuted with the Veyron to unlock max power—the original Type 35 had no such thing.
But the Top Speed Key was a unique inclusion the whole team got behind immediately. Hedley said, “We loved that. We really wanted to do that slight touch. It’s one of those bits where we were treading the fine line between being respectful of the original but also bringing some stuff from the modern.”
What does the Top Speed Key unlock in a miniature electric car? A lot, according to Hedley, “You stick it in full power mode, they are really, really fast. And people drive it, and they’re like ‘Oh my god, that’s fast.’ And you need the limited-slip diff.”
The miniature Baby II might not sound potent on paper but Hedley assured me that in real life, it sure is, explaining that, “...42 miles per hour doesn’t sound that fast, but when you’re sat on the ground, the wind whistling through your hair…”
Coming Soon: The DB5 Junior
Still, Hedley isn’t counting his laurels after the Baby II sold out in three weeks. He told me, “The DB5 is going to be even quicker, and you’re sat even lower, so you can really fling it into corners.”
Sources: thelittlecar.co, bugattibaby.com, and dailymail.co.uk.