Smart ForTwos are arriving on our shores by the boatload even as we type this, and the adorable little cars - c'mon, admit it, they're cute - start rolling into showrooms this week.
The company expects as many as 80 percent of the 30,000-plus people who forked over $99 to reserve one of the lilliputian two-seaters - ForTwo, get it? Aren't they clever? - to start driving their new cars home within days.
Most of those will be the upscale "passion coupe" - that's lowercase, we're told - models, which come with paddle shifters for the 5 speed transmission, alloy wheels, a stereo system and other features that add $2,000 to the price of the plain-Jane model Smart calls pure. The drop-top passion cabriolet goes for $16,590. We're tempted to get one just because it's the cheapest car with paddle shifters; getting 40 mpg is just frosting on the cake. Too bad the first run is sold out.
Of far more interest to us is the diesel and hybrid ForTwos that made a mad-dash from Los Angeles to Detroit for the show. Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetesche says the hybrid got 49 mpg and the diesel got 59.8. Smart says there's "no announcement" on whether either car is headed to the U.S.
