Having pared as much steel, aluminium, plastic, rubber, fabric and glass from this car as they felt they could get away with, Toyota’s weight-shaving engineers reckoned that any driver of this sylphic machine should try just as hard to minimize the load.

To ensure that their mission was honoured, said engineers provided this car with laughably little storage space, unless you were prepared to travel one-up and use the passenger seat and its footwell to stuff in more stuff.

Toyota’s third generation MR2, which appeared in time for the new century’s dawn in 1999, had no boot, and so little room under the bonnet that the desperate could stuff only shoes or a washbag into the spare wheel to supplement the glovebox and a pair of small cubbies behind the front seats. A dirty weekend in this car would be just that. Toyota’s weight-saving aims trimmed the MR2’s heft to 960kg and usefully reduced its size compared to the previous model, besides providing a neatly folding hood. It wasn’t as light as a Lotus Elise which could weigh as much as 210kg less, but it was a lot more affordable, slightly more civilized and almost as much fun.

The simplification mission extended to this tiny Toyota’s specification, which provided the choice of one engine – a 136bhp 1.8 litre – and initially one five-speed gearbox. Later there would be an automatic, and later still the addition of a sixth speed for both transmissions. That added weight, and so did extra stiffening to the body’s nose and tail – not that it was a wobbler in the first place – and an increase in wheel diameter from 15in to 16in, but the revised 2002 MR2 was still a light car for light travellers.

The lightness made the 138bhp a lot stronger than it sounds, revvy romps to 62mph possible in 7.9sec, which was swift enough to be exciting on sinuous twisties. And very exciting on the test route of the European launch, held in the hills of a Mediterranean island whose name has shamefully slipped your reporter’s memory. It wasn’t hard to discover the MR2’s fine chassis balance on these roads, which seemed to have been sheened with graphite, diesel, sand or some other slippery substance that had you wondering at the Toyota’s roadholding, if not its controllability.

Later drives on roads closer to home soon confirmed that it was the surface, not the Toyota, that lacked grip. It was a car that was all about the driving, though in this case to the exclusion of almost everything other than rain, which was very effectively repelled by its neatly folding roof.

The result was a car that captured more of the character of the legendary 1985 MR2, and with the added bonus of a fully removable roof, if not a boot to add civility to any long-distance adventuring. Such inconveniences limited sales less than you might expect, the last of the line MR2 more common than you might expect. 

This, and its no more than functional beauty, have allowed prices to plunge well below £3000 for hard-worked examples – like earlier MR2s, these machines are good for big six-figure distances, unless their engines suffer from disintegrating catalyst ingestion – despite their high entertainment quotient.

It takes a certain confidence to label a product ‘IQ’. You’ll want your buyers swiftly deducing that this is a better kind of thing, an intelligently designed thing that’s superior to others like it. Because if it isn’t, there’ll be plenty of scope for chippy little jokes.

Toyota’s IQ certainly looked different enough to shine a light on the future. It was smaller, taller and shorter than most cars, a little like a Smart ForTwo, but wider besides.

The unusual silhouette was all about packaging, Toyota keen to cram as much air into the IQ’s envelope as feasible. It was actually shorter than a classic Mini at 2985mm to the British car’s 3053mm, but almost a foot wider. A more relevant target for Toyota, though, was to have the IQ occupy the same length as a tiny Japanese kei car, even if it was wider and getting on for two feet longer than the original Smart ForTwo.

There were many more targets too. The IQ was to seat four – not necessarily in the most palatial comfort – pirouette more tightly than a London taxi, properly take a hit in crashes and cut a confident path along motorways. Cramming the solutions to these challenges into a self-propelling box less than three metres long was why it took Toyota five years to develop this car rather than the three it typically needed to realise a conventional supermini.

Novelties included a transmission case positioning the differential ahead of the engine rather than behind it, cutting the IQ’s front overhang appealingly short as well as allowing the front passenger seat to be mounted slightly ahead of the driver’s, to release (slightly) more room in the rear.

Also new were an airbag curtaining rear seat occupants’ heads owing to the equally short overhang at the rear, horizontally mounted rear dampers (an old Peugeot trick that yields more cabin space), a central take-off point for the steering column relative to its rack, a slender under-floor fuel tank, a miniaturised heating and air conditioner and – less radical this – slimmer seats.

There was further boldness in the IQ’s price, which was significantly higher than for most cheap city cars and for plenty of superminis too, buyers compensated not only with the tiny Toyota’s convenience, but an interior sculpted and furnished with considerable panache, especially compared to the plainer-than-porridge cabins of the rest of the company’s range.

The IQ was light enough that a 67bhp 1.0-litre four-pot was adequate for the task, though not light enough to be lighter than a Fiat 500, or to be fast. Blunting its performance still more effectively than a little too much heft, however, was gearing clearly intended to score the IQ fantasy official fuel figures that were nothing like what the labouring engine actually delivered. So the zipping enthusiasm possessed by the best city cars wasn’t quite there.

But what this Toyota proved unexpectedly good at was cruising. Despite the stunted footprint an IQ toed motorway lines with the doggedness of an Arctic explorer, crosswinds and truck draughts simply washing by. Once you attained a decent cruise, the high gearing and plush cabin made long trips a breeze. You didn’t have to slow for corners as much as its stubby wheelbase suggested either, the IQ’s width providing stability, its quick, accurate steering allowing you to make the most of its grip. Good in the country and great on a motorway, the IQ should have been brilliant in the city.

Only it wasn’t, quite. The extra width made it harder to find gaps to dart through, the tall gearing made it hard to muster said darting, and this assumed that you’d actually seen a gap to dart for, the Toyota’s fat pillars doing a good job of semi-blinding you. Its usefulness for urban errands was further undermined by a boot barely capable of swallowing a vacuum-wrapped plaice stored on its side. Those planning to carry people rather than fish in the rear would find that one could sit comfortably, two like sardines, and neither would enjoy much of a view past the IQ’s extravagantly swirly side pillars.

So not quite your ideal city car, this snub-nosed midget. Yet despite its flaws the IQ is charming, original and in the right circumstances, useful too. That it hasn’t been directly replaced tells you something, though, and should ensure that the IQ becomes a lot more collectible than most Toyotas. And still more so as an Aston Martin Cygnet, but that’s another story.