Toyota reveals a small iQ

The late Rudolf Bahro would have been flabbergasted by the Frankfurt Motor Show, now in progress, and especially by the Toyota iQ concept.

A reconstructed Marxist who was the architect of the Green political movement in Germany - he wrote Avoiding Social & Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation in 1987 - Bahro would be dumbfounded to look down from a heaven in which he certainly didn't believe to see that the most powerful productive industry in the capitalist world had appropriated all his precepts.

In every one of the nine

gigantic halls of the Frankfurt Show, every major manufacturer on earth is vying to prove itself greener and more ecologically sensitive than its rivals.

The age of the massive luxobarge is now so over that it will soon be as unthinkable for a self-respecting citizen to ride around in a big car as it became in a former age to have periwigged black footmen riding postillion for a coach-and-four.

The ultra-compact Toyota iQ concept is the car that we will be sandwiched into tomorrow.

Billed as the world's smallest