My First Smart

You knew the Smart car was tiny but this is ridiculous! The only way to get a legal Smart car in America right now is to buy a die-cast metal toy. Smart will begin selling in Canada and Mexico in a few months but the massive US market will be excluded. There must be some misguided marketing reason for doing this - they think all American require gigantic cars. I guess they also want to wait until they get a full infrastructure of dealers etc. in place. There's talk of a Smart SUV model coming to America which sounds like a big mistake - Don't we have enough SUVs?

A Day at the Beach

We took the Smart Rental Car out west. Drove to the coast and just kept going - right on the beach at Weston-super-mare. It seemed to be normal practice to use the beach as a parking lot over there - the sand was hard and wet and very level. That's a picture of me next to the car - it's a tall car. 

I still can't believe we drove around the country with those obnoxious graphics on the doors. We got stares on the motorway but weren't sure if people were more surprised by the diminutive size of the car or the loudness of the graphics splashed across the car.

Traveling Incognito - Not!

Thought it would be fun to find out out how this little car we'd been seeing everywhere actually drives. Rented a Smart Car though the German rental company Sixt out of the Stansted airport, north of London. We were impressed by the spaciousness of the interior and the extremely deft maneuverability. I got a kick out of the funky details of the interior - the protruding dials and vents - it all worked with the lighthearted design theme of the car. I found it surprisingly stable at speed - we easily kept up with traffic on the rain swept motorways heading east. We especially appreciated the "subtle" rental car graphics on the car which advertised the too-good-to-be-true rental rate of five pounds a day (which turned out to be a fraction of the final bill  due to a few pesky clauses in the extremely inflexible rental agreement).  A couple of pictures of the car in the charming old town of Wells, south of Bath.

Sleek Smart Cabrio

Here's a couple of pictures of the Smart Car Cabrio model, spotted on a visit to London in 2003. The design looks sleeker than the coupe - the headlights have been reshaped into a more aggressive form and the taillights have a cool wrap around treatment. The single color frame and body panel treatment really unify the design and the gradually upward sloping crease along the side accentuate the wedge shape. Not sure why they bothered with that lower little vestigial scribed line on the door though.

Smart in London

Smart Cars were hard to miss when I visited England for Christmas 2002. Here's a particularly handsome example in metallic silver and grey. The subtle contrast between the body panels make the car appear more sophisticated and upscale. The quality of the design sets it apart from the crowd. No one makes jokes about the original Swatch watch lineage anymore.

Not So Smart

Spotted this somewhere in Paris. I have no idea what it is, but it's not Smart. It appears to be a little longer than the Smart Car but doesn't have the design refinement and and flair. The quality of construction also seems dramatically sub par. That strange dent  and crease in the rear is actually a designed in style feature of some kind.

Smart in Paris

The futurist design of the Smart really set it apart in Paris when I visited in 1999. This was the first generation Smart Car, back one there was just a single version of the car. Later they named this model the "ForTwo" indicating the number of seats, to help differentiate it from the bigger "ForFour" four-seater model that never really caught on. From the beginning they made a big deal of the contrasting color "Tridion Safety Cell" to emphasize the safety feature of such a small vehicle, shown here in silver.

Original Smart

I spotted my first Smart Car near the Sacre Coeur in Paris back in 1999. Even in France where the streets are crawling with tiny hatchbacks this car stood out. It's unusual proportions and futuristic shape were enough to draw attention away from the local architectural attractions. More than a few foreign tourists were snapping pictures of the car.