Abigail is stopped at a red light when a couple of teenage skaters pick up their boards and peer into the window. She half expects some punk-ass sneers. After all, she's driving a neon-blue microcar that looks as though it belongs in a Hot Wheels collection. Her plastic-bodied ride, nearly 4 feet shorter than a Mini, is the least fast, least furious thing ever to hit US streets. Breaking into a smile, one kid blurts: "Can we hug your car?"
What's not to love? Abigail's Smart Fortwo, which she has been tooling around Washington, DC, as part of a focus group, is engineered by Mercedes; an early model already sits in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. But behind Smart's quirky design hides a radically sensible car. The Fortwo can park practically anywhere, even sideways in a compact garage spot. A diesel model, like Abigail's, gets nearly 70 miles to the gallon, making supergreen hybrids such as the 55-mpg Toyota Prius look like gas-guzzlers. And this year, a major study ranked the Fortwo's tailpipe the least polluting in the world, ahead of more than 1,200 cars.
Over the past decade, the Mercedes spinoff called Smart has emerged as Europe's most daring car company. It has rolled out a four-wheeled motorcycle. It has introduced a novel interlocking design that allows owners to change the car's color panels as often as they change cell phone faceplates. It has opened the world's first online dealership and sells cars out of towering glass vending machines across Europe. And it has experimented with Bluetooth, offering smartphone and iPod integration before any other carmaker.
All that - plus a sticker price starting at $13,000 - has helped the company snag the youngest average buyer of any global auto manufacturer, a snappy 37. And Smart's buyers are an enviably affluent bunch. Nearly half pay in full and in cash.
Now Smart is making a play for the US market. Even as Smart cars surged across Europe and spread to 31 countries, conventional wisdom in the States dismissed the diminutive city car as the Speedo of the automotive world - fashionable abroad but way too small. Smart's solution: Make the micro a mini SUV. Based on the Fortwo design, the Smart SUV will debut in January at the Detroit Auto Show and arrive for sale in 2006 for about $20,000.
But Smart fans don't have to wait until then, or travel to Europe, to see the cars up close. A highly unusual marketing plan will make the Smart hard to avoid. In addition to entering the SUV market, the company plans to introduce Americans to the Smart brand with the tiny Fortwo, wherever the creative class hangs out. Recently, Smart sponsored the Summer Play Festival on Broadway, an incubator for new dramatic talent. And this fall, Fortwos will buzz an art installation celebrating the restoration of JFK Airport's legendary, Eero Saarinen-designed Terminal Five and be a pace car for the New York City Marathon.
All the while, a funny thing is happening. With a gallon of gas approaching latte prices, hybrids like the Prius stealing "it" car status from mammoth 4x4s, and the Mini making piles of money for BMW, Americans appear far readier for Smart than Smart executives anticipated. Not just for a special supersized version, but for the quirky two-seaters as well.
After World War II, cheap microcars zipped all around Europe, many showing off spectacularly original design - three-wheeled chassis, bubble tops, outsize tail fins. But they were death traps firmly associated in the public mind with postwar depression. By the 1960s, they had all but disappeared, at least west of the Iron Curtain. When oil prices spiked a decade later and Europe's narrow city streets grew ever more crowded, Mercedes engineers recognized that, done right, microcars make a lot of sense. But two decades of prototypes failed to make them much safer, and the German automaker's project gradually lost momentum.
Around that time, Swatch founder Nicolas Hayek had the idea to transform European cities with a line of tiny plastic cars - a kind of four-wheeled version of the Segway. He shopped the idea to carmakers across Europe, until finally Mercedes bosses saw in Hayek's vision their own stalled ambitions for a modern microcar and spun off a division to revisit the design challenge.
As a startup, Smart was defiantly independent from its owner. Even uttering "Mercedes" at the office cost employees a 5-mark fine (about $3). In return, their older sibling rivals skewered Smart as Jugend forscht, or "youth research," after a German school science program. (The average age of Smart's employees is 31.)
This initial rift helped make Smart distinct from Mercedes. The two have since grown closer, especially after Mercedes bought out Hayek's share of the company in 1998. Still, Smart's plant in eastern France, dubbed Smartville, is the most innovative in the industry. Nearly all the car's components are manufactured by partner firms with their own production lines at Smartville, then routed through mechanized arteries in preassembled chunks to Smart's final assembly line, where an entire Fortwo comes together in only 41é2 hours (compared with more than 20 hours at a conventional car plant).
And nobody would mistake Benz austerity for Smart style. Earlier this year, I met Smart's chief designer, 37-year-old Hartmut Sinkwitz, at the company's new headquarters outside Stuttgart. (Ironically, his last gig was designing some of Mercedes' biggest luxury sedans.) Sinkwitz, dressed in a skinny black suit, is tall and quiet with pale eyes and a dun crewcut. As we climb into an original production-model Fortwo parked in the company's lab amid a dozen prototypes, he tells me how Smart engineers finally got a microdesign to work.
The bosses at Smart had called for a car only 8 feet long, Sinkwitz said. That would allow two of them to park in a standard spot, one behind the other - or three of them if they pulled in sideways. Yet inside, the Fortwo feels huge. A three-cylinder, 698-cc engine was moved from the front of previous micro prototypes to the back. The hood? Gone. Everything from the front bumper to the back tires became living space.
The problem was, with so little car out front, there was nothing left to crush between you and, say, an oncoming Escalade. So Smart designers invented the Fortwo's main style and safety feature: a bulky steel cell, visible inside and out, that frames the passenger compartment like a roll cage and absorbs the shock of a head-on collision. What happens if some Detroit-engineered behemoth plows into the featherweight Fortwo? I got a pretty good idea, watching a Smart-sponsored crash test with a Mercedes E-Class: The big sedan crumpled, and the Fortwo ricocheted. In a separate test, by the European New Car Assessment Program, a 40-mph impact with a concrete wall failed to dent the safety cell. They awarded the Smart a three-star crash rating - nothing like a Volvo but better than a Ford Escort, which weighs nearly half a ton more than the Fortwo.
An SUV may indeed be Smart's best shot at mainstream American appeal. In the meantime, it's the littlest Smart that's on a guerrilla marketing tour, where it's threatening to build something more than a cult following. Used Fortwos spark a frenzy when they occasionally show up on eBay. Car geeks in the US are expected to cross the border to buy them in Canada, where they arrive this fall, or Mexico, where they showed up last year. But any current models that come from overseas will have to be retrofit to pass more stringent US emission standards. One commercial importer, California's G&K Automotive Conversion, hopes to bring in 15,000 Fortwos a year - and then hack the engines to meet the law.
"There are some no-kidding-around fanatics petitioning us [to follow suit]," allows Scott Keogh, general manager of Smart USA. But it would be prohibitively expensive, he says, to adapt Smart's smallest cars to the precise emissions laws in the US and still offer them for, say, $14,000. The diesel Fortwo, bound for Canada, is a more interesting case - that version might win some fans at the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, which determine which cars are street legal.
Until then, there are always visiting hours. "We were looking at affordable cars, that 20th-century Bauhaus dream, or arts and crafts dream, of good design for everyone," says MoMA's curator of architecture and design Peter Reed. "Of all the cars we looked at, this was the most innovative, the most aesthetically pleasing, the most ecological," he said. "Even the way it's manufactured - everything about it is really intelligent." And what could be more huggable than a smart car?
With its wimpy 50-horsepower engine, the Fortwo takes 20 seconds to get from zero to 60. But the Smart is a charmer - not least because of all the clever innovations on board. -éDM
Body panels
Made from a hybrid of soda-bottle and CD plastic, the panels require no paint - the color is solid all the way through and therefore unscratchable. Interlocking parts make swapping panels easy.
Safety cell
A steel frame absorbs front-end impact - no cockpit crumple. Get hit head-on, and the car collapses behind the doors near the back wheels. The cell is also powder coated, not painted, to cut down on noxious chemicals at the plant.
"Spacious" design
A slender dashboard, staggered seats, a windshield that appears to drop nearly to your feet, and a transparent roof made of plastic (or glass, with upgrade) - these make the tiny cabin feel huge.
Shifting
All cars come with both automatic and clutchless manual transmission (there's no room for a clutch).
Wireless features
Some Smarts have in-dash Bluetooth. Hit an answer-call button built into the rearview mirror, and your Sony Ericsson phone pauses the stereo and takes over the car speakers.
Smartphone
In Europe, thanks to a joint effort with T-Mobile, you can jack your phone into the dash and hear email via the car speakers (even dictate replies, too). It also guides you to parking spots reserved for Smarts.
Handling systems
Mercedes' Eletronic Stability Program, antilock brakes, brake assist, and traction control are standard in Smarts - not bad for a $13,000 car.
Douglas McGray wrote about Darpa's robot race in Wired 12.03.
credit: Illustration by Jesse Jensen
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