Bugatti Type 52

The Bugatti Type 52 was a half-scale Bugatti Type 35 electric racing car for children, built at the Molsheim factory between 1927 and 1936. About 500 were made, roughly 150 of them the short-nosed variant and the rest a long-nosed variant that was 10 centimetres longer for older children. The first was built for Ettore Bugatti's four-year-old son Roland and first shown at an exhibition in Milan; the factory always called the car the Baby. It was driven by a single 12 volt electric motor with forward and reverse, with expanding wooden shoe brakes on the front and rear drums, and was used both as a plaything and for more serious racing among the children of the European elite. In 2019 The Little Car Company of Launton, England, received a full licence from Bugatti to reproduce it as a three-quarter-scale electric car called the Baby II.