September is car season in Kalamazoo. There’s an electric car show coming up on Saturday the 28th. Last weekend, vintage cars known as “street rods” filled the Kalamazoo Expo Center. On Saturday, a repair shop in Portage held a show for “cute” cars.
While the cars were pulling into the Metric Motorworks front lot, I spoke with Ben Hastings about what inspired the Cute Car Show. He’s the shop’s owner and the organizer of Saturday's event. He explained that he wanted to create a space for cars that may be overlooked at more traditional shows.
“You know, all of these car events are all, like, muscle cars and sports cars, and it's hard to find enough events for sort of the under-appreciated cars, small cars, cars that aren't necessarily super cool,” he said.
His wife, Jessie, added: “We wanted a vibe that was a little bit less... I don’t want to say intense, but just something different. Different flavor.”
There were about a dozen cars in attendance over the course of the afternoon, including Ry Charters’ bright blue MGB. That’s a two-door, open-top English sports car.
I asked him what he thought made his car cute. He explained: “Well, it's only a five-inch clearance off the ground. So it's down there; it's like a toddler. And the color is pretty cute, and it's got the round headlights and little teeny tiny rear-view mirrors and everything.
"So everything's pretty small on it. So that makes it cute. But the design is pretty big and bold. So it's a nice contrast there.”
The show also featured a Japanese kei truck. That’s a class of truck built to satisfy certain size and weight requirements in order to be considered “light vehicles” by the Japanese government. The truck, with a tiny two-person cab and a full-size truck bed, looked like a semi-trailer not yet out of infancy. A couple cars away: a chubby-looking two-door car from the German brand Lloyd. It was painted a cheery yellow.
Elizabeth Lindau owns a Nissan Pao. That’s a little three-door hatchback first manufactured in 1989. Lindau and her Pao are regulars at summer shows at the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners.
“It's interesting being a woman who owns a car—and also this small and cute. It's a little unusual,” she said. “People are always nice to me, no matter the situation, but it's fun to be... like, feel around my fellow car—small, cute car people here.”
Lindau said this show fills a niche in car culture. "It's nice to showcase that there can be more sides to cars than just, you know, the speed, or the... 'cause I don't have any speed. I can barely get up a hill.”
Anywhere else, Lindau’s car would look tiny. But in this setting, it seemed right at home. She told me, “It's actually so small—like, we have a two-car garage, but we sneak a third—we sneak it in there as a third, 'cause in the winter, it becomes a three-car garage. They barely fit, but they do fit.”
Some of the cars at the show struck me as cute right away. They were small, or bright colors, or seemed to be squished onto their unintimidating frames.
For others, the first word that came to mind was “classic” or “vintage.” But here, there was no elaborate judging process, no final arbitration of “cute” and “not cute”; it was left to the eye of the beholder.
For Terri Dennehy, owner of a 1961 MGA—that’s a vintage English sports car, painted pale blue and finished with racing stripes—owning a cute old car is a source of joy.
“When it rains, the windows leak and the hood leaks and, you know, so it's a fair-weather car,” Dennehy explained. “But it's definitely... if you're having a bad day, just come home and get in the car and go around the block, and it's fun.”
Metric Motorworks owner, Ben Hastings, says he was pleased by the turnout, and he hopes to host a cute car show again.
