Start sending out that envy energy, sullen hordes, because in a few hours I'll be tooling around the city in the geekiest of geekmobiles, a brand new made-for-America Smart car. And it only took three years of conniving, cajoling and waiting to get there.
It started on a trip to Amsterdam, where spouse and I saw numerous Smarts careening down narrow cobblestone streets, parking on sidewalks and generally inserting themselves into a challenging urban landscape. And we both immediately thought: What a great thing to park in San Francisco!
Yes, the Smart is quite frugal with gas, merely by being properly sized for the majority of trips one uses a car for. But it was the parkability we longed for. Those red-curb-sandwiched pieces of sidewalk that look they ought to be a parking space but never quite fit what you're driving? 0wn3d!
We failed in convincing a Dutch Smart dealer to let us go for a test drive, but a subsequent visit to Canada afforded the opportunity and set in stone the idea that this must be our next city car.
We were even almost ready to pay double the sticker price for one of the European Smart cars "Americanized" by Zap, but peculiarities in California vehicle law classified those as gray market imports that couldn't be registered in the state until they had 20,000 miles on the odometer. Or something like that. And since my Arizona mother didn't like the potential insurance headache of registering a car in her name, it seemed like we were destined to have to wait for the Smart to make its official American debut.
