The King Midget was produced from 1946 through 1970 by the Midget Motors Corporation. While Civil Air Patrol pilots during WWII, Claud Dry and Dale Orcutt made plans for their post-war enterprise. Their goal was to build a lightweight, inexpensive, basic kit car. The design was so simple that it had a 1-speed automatic transmission of their own design. Power was supplied to only one rear wheel, eliminating the need for a differential.
In 1946, the King Midget MK I sold for a mere $270. What the purchaser received was an instruction manual, chassis, springs, axles, steering and patterns for a sheet metal body. The kit did not come with an engine; that was up to the buyer to supply. Any air-cooled 1-cylinder powerplant would do. A completely assembled car was available at a higher price and included a 6-horsepower Wisconsin engine. By 1956, the Midget Motors Corporation had surpassed the MK I with the larger, more powerful MKII that was available in either kit or assembled form, the latter priced at about $550.
Plans were laid that year to introduce the MKIII, the still larger version on a wheelbase stretched from 72 to 76.5 inches. This King Midget came with 4-wheel hydraulic brakes for the first time and a more powerful engine rated at 9.2 horsepower. They sold for just under $900 when the price of one of the newly introduced economy cars from Detroit was around $1,800.
The introduction of the Rambler from American Motors during late 1957 and Falcon from Ford, Lark from Studebaker, Corvair from Chevrolet and similar small cars from Detroit the next year kept King Midget production low for a total of about 5,000 built through the end of production in 1969 due to bankruptcy.
The first King Midget appeared in 1947 as a single-seater kit car accepting any one-cylinder engine. The price was 270 Dollars. From 1951 the Midget company was based in Athens, Ohio, offering the model in assembled form, using a six-horsepower Wisconsin motor and a one-speed automatic transmission of their own construction. Also in 1951, the second model was launched, a two-seater with a classic roadster body style and 7.5 horsepower produced by a Wisconsin 400cc L-head engine. That car, unofficially named Model II, was offered assembled or as a kit until 1957.
1958 brought the Model III with modern styling and a power output of 9.25 horsepower. The transmission was now a two-speed automatic. A few changes were made over the following years, and 1967 saw a 477cc engine by Kohler delivering a strong 12 horsepower. In 1969 the production of this lovely Ohio pocket-size roadster for just 1,095 Dollars came to a halt - after some 5,000 cars and the awareness that just a very few micro car manufacturers lived that long.
