The story
History
Auto Mirage of Bologna was founded in 1972, and it began, like its partner All Cars, by building beach buggies.source 1source 2source 3 Its buggies included the Mirage, the most popular, at 1,430,000 lire; the Pirana of 1974, styled like a Porsche 911, cost 1,490,000 lire, and the Moon Buggy of the same year 1,680,000.source 3 In 1974 came the Pick Wick, a leisure car on the mechanicals of the Fiat 126, also sold as the Amigo.source 1
The Mirage 3 of 1976 was something else: a small two-seater for France, where a 49.9 cc engine made it a true licence-free car, a voiture sans permis. The engine was a Franco Morini, which the old site calls a Motori, with 4 PS (2.9 kW).source 2source 1 The car was 2,150 mm (7 ft 1 in) long, 1,250 mm (4 ft 1 in) wide and 1,450 mm (4 ft 9 in) high, and weighed 200 kg (441 lb).source 2source 1
What the old microcarfan.com found unusual was the wheels. It says only that the Mirage 3’s three were arranged the other way round from the fashion of the day.source 2 Most licence-free three-wheelers of the 1970s, such as the Arola, had their single wheel at the front, and the car in the pictures here has its pair of wheels at the front, at the corners of the nose.
SR3 and SR4
In 1981 a re-bodied three-wheeler, the SR3, was offered in Italy with BCB engines of 125 or 250 cc, and seems never to have been imported to France. With a fourth wheel it became the SR4, and the old site asked its readers what else they would have called it. The SR4 was 2,270 mm (7 ft 5 in) long and weighed 300 kg (661 lb) empty.source 2 The old site says the two joined the Mirage 3; the German Wikipedia says they replaced it.source 2source 1 All of them stayed in production a long time without notable change.source 2source 3 Production ended in 1985, according to the German Wikipedia.source 1
Almost all of this comes from the old microcarfan.com; the two other accounts found lean on it. No source found records how many were built, what they cost, or who imported them to France.
