I live in Edmonton and work in Nisku, and thus regularily pass large semis hauling dirt, tubulars, oil rigs, etc. etc.
I also see at least a few Smart cars a week - today I saw one with the optional bike rack which made me jealous 'cause biking is my #1 hobby, I pay $150-$200 /mo just to commute, and I’m unlikely to fit in one due to being 6’5".
The trunk is actually quite large - there’s a picture around of someone who fit 16 boxes of beer in the back someplace. It’s very safe in collisions with larger cars (Here’s some pics of a Smart car that got hit with an SUV even). Given that 99% of the time I drive with either myself or only 1 other person, if I were shorter, there’s no question I’d get one.
How is this company still in business? They’ve never made any money on these cars since they were introduced, and trying to comply with US automotive standards and sell them here strikes me as nothing more than a way to lose more money faster.
There might be a small niche market (some people liked those worthless electric cars, after all), but nothing more than that.
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It seems to me that only small subset of accidents can be avoided by having a car with good performance. I have been rear ended in stop and go traffic a few times manouverablity would not help in that situation.
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There are a lot of different kinds of accidents.
Getting read-ended at a stop sign and getting t-boned while legally crossing an intersection are two kinds where maouverability, breaking and steering don’t mean diddly-squat.
The kind that happen from sliding on rain/snow/ice, or by rolling over from an evasive-type move, handling of course makes a difference. They don’t do rollover tests for nothing. According to this site, 82% of crashes that involved fatalities were rollovers, and rolling over is a consequence of poor manouverability.
Seeing as how American car makers seem to be unable to make a profit on any car in the US these days, why not give it a shot?
When Daimler Chrysler announced a couple years back that they weren’t going to offer the Smart cars in the US, I was bummed. I spent yesterday wondering how long the waiting lists are going to be for these when it first comes out.
It has been a while since I worked at DCX, but when I was there, the biggest requirement that was holding back the SMART cars was roof-crush requirements.
I did get a chance to drive one of the 2 seaters around the streets of Detroit. We took it to a Baseball game, downtown. If it can handle the street surfaces in downtown Detroit, it can handle any road surfaces. It was a lot of fun, we were abusing the transmission, by manually selecting the gears, and were able to get some decent speeds on the highway. It was a diesel version.
Did you watch it right to the end? They said that although the rigid steel cabin frame remained fairly intact, the small size of the car means there simply isn’t enough space to decelerate the cabin anything other than almost instantly. The video concludes by saying that people inside both of the cars they crash tested would almost certainly have died.
I’d seen the Smart-car crash portion of this video before, but not the whole thing. Thanks greatly–it answered some questions I was having as well… especially about occupant survivability in any car in such a crash.
Even if the ‘saftey cage’ of the Smart does not crush in it’s impact with a Hummer, the passenger of the Smart is going to experence ahellofalotmore force then that of the Hummer.
Likewise hitting a stationary object, the Hummer is much more likely to break or push that object then the Smart, giving the passengers more time to slow down in a collision.
Not to mention the very small crumple zone.
Well that may have been true, and I’m not going to sign on for a head on w/ a Hummer, but Subaru’s have very good crash survivability, IIRC the Outback in '05 and '06 both got a 5 star rating on all collisions tested including side impact.
I wonder if the accident rates of those with literally smaller cars are lower than those of those with bigger cars, because they take up less space on the road. Granted, they are harder to see, but that makes no difference if you can barely fit in your lane in the first place.
I find it hard to believe that the maneuverability of your small Subaru makes you measurably safer than say a midsized generic American sedan. I will buy SUV rollover makes SUVs less safe than sedans.
I just hope they bring the diesel version over as well, the Smart would be the perfect car for me, 99% of my driving is to and from work (less than 10 miles each way) on backroads with a top speed limit of 45 MPH, and i’m the only occupant, even my Neon is overkill sizewise…
make the diesel version able to handle biodiesel and you’d have a killer combination
Plug-in biodiesel-electric hybrid. That is the goal…
Thoughn I’m not sure whether you could squeeze all the necessary systems into a Smart Fortwo. Apparently some Canadians are running their Fortwo TDIs on biodiesel, though.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that the stopping distance of these little cars is going to be pretty good; that’s potentially one avenue of accident avoidance. Not that I suspect it’s enough to offset the adverse aspects of driving amongst monsters.
I don’t understand why they don’t make these hybrid and electric cars less weird looking. Nobody wants to drive a vehicle that screams “DORK!” and the few people that do buy them are not going to make the difference in fuel emissions and gas economy that we truly need. After these companies develop the technology to make efficient and safe vehicles like the Smart Car, they need to find a way to apply that technology to a conventional-looking car body. I think they also look too “European” for them to catch on in America.
Toyota is doing it right by offering hybrid versions of their regular lineup, so that people can get the benefits of a hybrid without buying a car that is, and let’s make no mistake here, very weird looking by automobile standards. Even with cars like the Chevy HHR and the PT Cruiser out there, at least those still look kind of like normal cars, just retro versions of them. But the Smart Car and so many other hybrids I’ve seen just look like toys. And people don’t want to drive toys, they want to drive normal-looking cars.
Besides the few quirky PhDs who are buying weirdo hybrid and electric vehicles, most people want a regular car.
Last I heard, DC had just slipped to second place behind Toyota in car sales in the US, and wasn’t hurting financially. GM has the highest costs per unit in the industry, while DC has some of the lowest, both GM and Ford have had their bonds reduced to junk by financial institutions, haven’t heard the same about DC.
Shouldn’t be a problem. Most diesels can handle biodiesel without modifications, the only exception I know of are certain model VWs, and all one needs to do is replace the fuel lines with stainless steel ones for them to be able to use it.
