Miguel Lopes says:

I’m quite surprised with this news, as the car is quite popular in Europe (or at least in Portugal, where I live, but that’s a tiny market), especially with the younger, ‘cool’ crowd.

My personal opinion is that it’s too small a car for the open road, although it’s quite fast. I think it’s meant to be a strictly ‘for the city’ car. I’d like to see it with an electrical motor, or a hybrid one. Then maybe it would make sense. But only in Europe, I think. The idea I have is that in the US you prefer huge SUV-like cars 🙂

david says:

It’s a cute car but getting into an accident with it is not my idea of playing the accordion.

Miguel Lopes says:

The problem with the SMART and crashes doesn’t seem to be it’s crash resistance – apparently it passes the european crash tests with the ‘cockpit’ mostly intact.

However, I’ve heard that if someone gets stuck inside one of these if a crash occurs, and the ‘cockpit’ is damaged, the resue services will have a tough time getting him/her out, as the tools currently in use aren’t strong enough to cut through the metal bars that protect the ‘cockpit’. May be enough for someone to bleed to death inside while the rescue is trying to get him/her out! Yikes! I don’t know how they cut the car in those circumstances, just heard this some time ago, and it sounds sinister…

As for it being ugly, it kind of grows on you… I though it was ugly, now I’m mostly indifferent to it. Young ladies seem to be crazy about it, though 🙂

Monty says:

Americans and their paranoia.. It never ends. We would think based on our need to keep buying larger and larger vehicles that we are all playing chicken on the roads. I spend most of my day in bumper to bumper traffic with big SUV’s surrounding me. Never mind that when we look at deaths per accident that the Honda Civic is safer than a Ford Explorer or GM Suburban — let’s keep on buying bigger vehicles, people — so we can be safe. Humbug.

What is great about small vehicles is they let you avoid accidents entirely.

That said, why these efficient small vehicles costing less then 25K continue to lose their respective manufacturers money while the huge H2’s costing 50K or more are big money makers is — oh, wait.. I think the answer is pretty clear after all.

–Monty

Thomas says:

Too much of anything is not good. This ugly POS falls into the “too small” category. If all my commutes were ten minutes where I had to park on a street with tight parking, I might see the benefit. But in LA, where your commute is thirty minutes to an hour on average and most of your battle is not to get hit by an SUV that can’t see something this small, I don’t really see the benefit.

If they sold it for $100 and included removal when it died, it’d sell in the US. Other than that, I think they are stuck selling this to a select small (heh) group of Europeans.

yorkpaddy says:

I would be interested in one if the price were right. I drove a full size pickup for 6 years, since I started driving, because I ran a lawncare business. I no longer run the business, thus no longer need the truck.

Here is a post I wrote about small cars.
http://yorkpaddy.blogspot.com/2004/12/small-cars.html

I also really wish they let people drive ATVs on the streets without jumping through all the hoops.

http://yorkpaddy.blogspot.com/2005/01/street-legal-atvs.html

Steve Polo says:

Thank you for posting this article – I would buy one.

It is a shame to see that it isn’t selling well.