In early May, the Smart division of Mercedes-Benz announced the discontinuation of U.S. and Canadian sales of the Smart Fortwo, a tiny two-seater. It is fair to say that the move surprised no one who had been paying attention to the manufacturer’s travails — the car had nearly been discontinued before, and the vehicle’s shortcomings were obvious. Despite its tiny size, it has a minuscule 60-mile range, room for only two passengers and a boot that would reject more than four or five bags of groceries. Though the second-most efficient and least expensive all-electric vehicle on the market, it was unsuited, it would seem, to the needs of U.S. consumers.
But when I heard the news, I took it with a fair amount of sadness. My two-month-old Fortwo was charging just a few feet away at the time.
Having been a “luxury car” driver for the past 12 years, I probably did not seem like a Smart prospect, but the truth is that my old BMW’s drawbacks — premium gas only, atrocious mileage, always high, and increasingly outlandish, repair bills — had made me receptive to at least seeing some of the Smart’s well-documented liabilities as virtues. Although I did appreciate the BMW’s go-cart performance, I ignored most of its fancier features. And, like many urban dwellers, I don’t drive that much — just enough that my wife and I each need our own cars most days, but not enough to want to spend a lot of money on one.
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I car-shopped for a month or so, but when I checked out the Fortwo, that was it. I had found the one. While I have read that the gas version of the car is noisy and can feel underpowered, the electric version is none of these things — it’s silent, responsive and accelerates at least as well as my old car. It’s a lot of fun on the highway. And, despite its dimensions, the car feels roomy enough on the inside: Ample legroom in a cabin that is higher up than my old sedan, giving a view of the road closer to the perspective from a minivan. As an owner, I’ve also come to appreciate the car’s size, at only a couple feet longer than a recumbent NBA player. Parking is a breeze, even in more congested corners of the D.C. area, and it really is dirt cheap to drive, having had no visible effects so far on my electric bill.
But of course, to experience any of these virtues, you have to get in one, and I would guess Smart failed in the United States because too few potential drivers ever considered the car. (The gas version of the car, mostly seen as part of the Car2Go car-sharing fleet, will continue to be produced and sold directly to Car2Go, itself now part of a joint venture between Daimler, the owner of Mercedes-Benz and Smart, and BMW.)
I do see a few privately owned Fortwos around D.C. and other urban areas from time to time, most of them driven by younger people, presumably attracted to the car’s relative greenness, ease of parking and low cost. But the other logical market — families like mine that need two cars but only kind of — were mostly never going to fall for Smart no matter how much sense a micro car might make.
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Our kids are in college now, but even when my wife and I were taking turns shuttling them to school, we never realistically needed two full-size cars. The problem is that if you’re going to live in a household with — say — an SUV and a Smart, the way child-care and shopping duties are distributed in most families means the SUV is going to be mom’s primary car, not dad’s. And for a lot of guys, that might not sit so well. Way back in its April 2008 issue, the now-shuttered Men’s Vogue asked, rhetorically, whether the Smart was “too mini for a man.”
Share this articleShareIn a country where many people — and especially men — still see their vehicle as a projection of their social position, wealth or power, a two-door car that’s barely eight feet from bumper to bumper is really a hard sell. I understand the sentiment; I was also guilty, when I bought my BMW, of seeing my vehicle as something other than just transportation. It’s just that the reality of owning it served as a bit of a reeducation.
The failure of Smart may be just another case where local politics, whether within cities or within marriages, makes addressing the larger issues of sustainability challenging. No matter what future generations think about cars as opposed to bicycles, ride booking or transit, it’s hard to imagine that the conflation of auto and identity will ever completely go away — I certainly have had car obsessives among the (mostly suburban) college students I teach.
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The weeks since the Smart announcement have also come with a fair amount of troubling environmental news, and the reality is that a few more electric cars here or there is not going to do much to solve climate change. But the Smart car could have been an example of what might help: green choices that also solve problems more cheaply and pleasurably than polluting ones. It’s too bad the United States wasn’t ready for it.
Read more:
How to teach right and wrong to self-driving cars
This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps
I wasn’t just learning to drive on the right. I was becoming an American.
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