Cozy Coupe

The car's design, described as "a cross between a Volkswagen Beetle and Fred Flintstone's vehicle", was created by Jim Mariol of Cincinnati-based manufacturer Design Alliance, who had worked as a designer at Chrysler starting in 1952 and engineered by Shirish Patel, Little Tikes' Vice President of Engineering and Product Engineer John Fawcett. ==Evolution==

First sold in 1979 as one of the first molded-plastic toy cars sold in the United States, it was called the "world's best-selling car for much of this decade" by The New York Times in 1998, outselling the Honda Accord and Ford Taurus. By 1997, its sales of 313,000 units in the US and another 100,000 sold in the United Kingdom in 1997, would have made it the fifth-best-selling car in the US among real vehicles. By 1998, Little Tikes introduced the Cozy Coupe II, a redesigned model of its original classic that retained the red and yellow bubble-shaped exterior, while adding thicker pillars on the front roof, among other enhancements, including a remote control that makes sounds of doors unlocking, the horn beeping, the engine starting and a car alarm. J. C. Penney had included the updated car in its catalog starting in August 1998, with sales since its introduction doubling the sales in the corresponding five months of 1997. Total 1998 sales were expected to exceed 250,000 units. In 2009 Rakesh Patel, the owner of the first Cozy Coupe ever made, donated the very first Cozy Coupe off the assembly line from 1979 to the collection of the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in celebration of the coupe's 30th anniversary. ==References==