Saw my first Smart ForTwo....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Last evening, after work, I stopped at my local BJ’s Wholesale to gas up my Ion, while there, I decided to get some groceries, when I walked back to my car, I saw it…

a blue Smart ForTwo in the next lot over, of course, I had to check it out, I’m a car guy and like all kinds of cars…

Boy, when they say the Smart is small, they’re not kidding, the thing is TINY, it makes my Saturn Ion look like a Lincoln Town Car by comparison, the entire car could fit in the space displaced by my Ion’s passenger compartment alone, I could fit two Smarts side by side in my tiny work area at work

My thought process upon seeing the Smart was;

Hmm, that looks like a Smart ForTwo… (approach the mystery car)
Yep, definitely a Smart…
Geez, that thing is TINY!..
Really TINY!..
kinda’ cute, in a homely way…
…looks pretty unsafe though, I’d hate to come up against an SUV in the thing
…the interior looks pretty cramped too…

the owner came out to load up his Smart with groceries, we chatted a bit, he said he’s getting around 40 MPG in it, but he just filled it up a few days ago, he’s had it a little over a week and a half

as we parted ways and I thanked him for letting me check it out, I thought…

only 40 MPG, geez, for a car that tiny, you’d think it’d get better fuel mileage, I’d hate to take that thing on the highway, the tires alone aren’t much bigger than a go-cart’s tires

once I got past the shock over it’s microscopic size, i was distinctly underwhelmed with the cramped interior, and the fact that it’d be a scary experience to take it on the highway…

I’m sure as an in-town commuter car it excels, but given my commute on hilly back roads, a short stint on I-95, and the congestion of Portsmouth NH’s commercial district, the Smart would really only be useful in Portsmouth gridlock

as a secondary commuter car I’m sure it’s brilliant, but it would not work for me as primary transportation

2

I do wonder if this “small = unsafe” idea is a uniquely American attitude. Okay, I know you have more monster trucks and stuff on your roads :wink: but it seems like the first thing an American says when they see a small car is “Gee, I’d hate to have a wreck in that.” Over here, the reaction to Smarts is generally “Hmm, I’d feel a bit of a tit driving that” (male) or “Aaahhhh, it’s so cute!” (female). Safety doesn’t seem to come into it, really.

3

I saw my first one this July 4th weekend in the hotel parking area, lemmon yellow. It got a lot of “Wows” from my 7 y.o. The funny thing was this hotel had the biggest parking spaces I’d ever seen, easily 1.5X normal size. I’d even gone to the Concierge to compliment him on them since it was near impossible to get a door ding. Seeing a SmartCar parked there… I’ve not seen the Mini Me sex video but there’s gotta be a few parallels between the two

4

Well, how much do they cost wholesale? I’ve only ever paid retail…

5

The Roadster was way cooler…but they don’t make it any more.

6

There’s the problem in a small nutshell. America has pretty much always been the land of the BIG CAR and in the past decade or so, we’ve become the land of the BIG SUV. Through the years, there’s also been no shortage of BIG PICKUP TRUCKS.

Whether or not people actually need big vehicles is a debate that needs to be left to another thread.

If the Smart’s fuel economy is “only” 40 MPG, then yes, it’s not living up to the hype and the expectations one would naturally have on seeing such a tiny vehicle. Its less obvious strength is its abilty to fit into small parking spaces.

Count me among the ranks that would feel uncomfortable driving a vehicle on the freeway that’s so small it could be parked in my pickup’s bed. It would just be a speed bump to some fool in an Escalade.

7

I agree that the fuel economy is not as small as one might first expect upon seeing the car. The Smart was designed first as a city car for narrow places, and only secondarily as a fuel miser. It’s also a ‘premium’ small car, like the Mini, so it’s not as inexpensive as one might think either.

But it is tougher than one might expect. There’s a video floating around teh intarwebz of a remote-controlled Smart hitting a concrete barrier at 70 miles an hour and its passenger compartment remaining largely uncrushed.

8

One of my longtime freinds is originally from Liverpool, England, the way he’s described things to me is that most vehicles over in Europe are much smaller than in the U.S., what we consider a “compact” car is considered a “Midsize” over The Pond, for example, my Saturn Ion is classed as a Compact car here, wheras in England, it’d be considered a Midsize

In the U.S., we’re spread out a lot more than in Europe, i have a 9 mile commute to work, most of it on hilly back roads, there’s about 9-10 houses on the 5 miles of backroads, lots of open space and large property areas, coincidentally, the average vehicle driven by an American in my area is either a midsize car (Camry/Taurus/Malibu/Accord size), a full-size truck (Chevy 1500/Ford F-150/Dodge Ram 1500), or any of the myriad varieties of SUV, ranging from Suzuki XL-7 to Chevrolet Subdivision…err…Suburban, most common is Jeep Cherokee/Grand Cherokee/Ford Explorer size)

compound the increased presence of larger vehicles with distracted/agressive/psychotic morons yakking on cell phones and not paying attention to driving (this morning, there was an accident at the Portsmouth Traffic Circle where an Acura MDX SUV rear-ended a Nissan Sentra and stove the rear end of the car all the way into the rear wheel wells), you can understand where my “not safe” mindset came from

I’ve seen the crash test footage, I know the Smart is safe and well designed, but it’s simply dwarfed by vehicles that would carry a greater deal of kinetic energy into a collision, I mean, the Smart could theoretically be stored in the pickup bed of an average full-size pickup here as a backup vehicle (forget the spare tire, I’ll take the spare vehicle to the next gas station…), how’s it going to fare against physically larger “predators”

9

Yet, you rarely hear someone looking at a SUV saying…“nice, but I’d hate to run into a semi or a loaded coach bus with that thing.”

10

They had a ForTwo at the Wired NextFest in Chicago and I was able to climb into both the driver and passenger seats. I’m six feet tall and 300 lbs. BIG guy. OK? I didn’t find the interior cramped at all. By not pretending that a set of passenger seats is even possible in a car this small, they were able to give the two seats plenty of legroom. By not having an engine at the front, the footroom is excellent as well. I don’t know why, but I usually hit my head on the door frame getting into many SUVs, while I didn’t in the much smaller ForTwo.

The default American position is that any car this small and light must be a “deathtrap”. It’s small and light, but in my opinion so little mass makes it safer. The killing force in a majority of wrecks, especially with SUVs are the vehicles own mass. Here’s a ForTwo crashing into a concrete barrier at 70 miles an hour. And the passenger door can still open! There’s a crash test somewhere with a Mercedes E class vs a ForTwo. The E crumpled…while the Smart bounced.

11

If it got 60 or 70MPG it would be a good deal.

12

I’m more interested in the Zenn myself. Since my commute doesn’t include highway time, I could pull it off. It’s only around 14k for the base 2007 model. But I just can’t do it. I drop 2 kids off at daycare every day, and there just isn’t any room for them.

13

My issue is, it costs too much for the size. Doesn’t it cost around $10K still? With no trunk space and hardly any room for groceries, I’d expect to pay half that. I’d buy it, if it ran $5K or so. Maybe in a few years.

14

I think a real risk would be that the car would be flung by the impact - the momentum transfer is really gonna be significant.

15

In Canada, it started out at $18k to $22k in 2004 or 5, whenever they started selling it. Don’t forget: it’s a ‘premium’ small car. And at the same time, the Mini was almost 30k–I was shocked. This was just before the runup in the Canadian dollar, so maybe it’s cheaper now.

Edit: starting at 15k in Canada.

16

Hee… I’ve got a 4-cylinder Tacoma for work. (I build museum exhibits) There is a ForTwo that I see in the mornings. With a ramp, I really think that thing would fit in the be of my truck. And I got the smallest truck I could find.

17

You see quite a lot of Smart ForTwos around here. But, indeed, it is an urban car. For some reason, quite a few people in the Netherlands have been buying huge SUVs (status symbol and stuff, I imagine). It is verrrrrry entertaining to watch them trying to negotiate the narrow, winding, twisty little streets that abound in the city centres around here :smiley:

However, the ForTwo is supremely well adapted to navigate that kind of terrain, which is extremely prevalent throughout Europe.

Another phenomenon: You will see HUMONGOUS amounts of ForTwos being used as company vehicles here. Possibly to deter the employees from “borrowing” them to take the wife and kids around :wink:

Just my 2 eurocent!

18

Myself, I’m waiting for a VentureOne.

A car that just screams . . . “The driver is too much of a pussy to buy a motorcycle.”

19

Concur. They are compact, but they don’t generally evoke “OMG SMALL!!!111ONE” reactions. OTOH, I drove past a used car place in Surrey the other day that had a number of American cars of various vintages on sale, and my reaction was pretty much “bloody hell, I could park several cars on the bonnet* of that thing”

(*=hood)

20

I don’t really like the Smart Car, but, having driven one about six or seven years ago, the one thing I was impressed with was the roomy interior. It may seem cramped from the outside, but it’s surprisingly roomy. In fact, I would say it feels roomier than the front two seats of my Mazda 3.