( New York Times ) - It's been a month since I bought my Smart car, and I am having a great time with it. As I mentioned in a brief piece last week, the car is a hoot, but not an unalloyed hoot. My wife is not happy with the ride, though it may grow on her.
Meanwhile, the crash test ratings are in from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, and they look good: the little car earned an overall rating of "good" for front and side impacts (though a door came open in that group's side-crash test, as it did in an earlier test by the National Highway Traffic Safety Adminstration).
I'm not surprised by the positive rating. The car has a very solid feel. For one thing, it doesn't feel so small when I'm in it - maybe because you sit pretty high, and you don't notice that half a car has been cut off behind you where the back seats would have been. Or maybe it's like those tents in the Harry Potter stories that are bigger on the inside than on the outside. In any case, I felt much more vulnerable over a recent weekend when Avis upgraded me to a Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible.
I keep waiting for people in the real world to give me as hard a time about my choice as some of the folks on the message boards here have, but the nasty comments are nowhere to be found.
As I was waiting at a New Jersey jughandle for a light to change, a black Hummer H3 drove up on my right. Anyone watching might have laughed at the juxtaposition of these two very different vehicles. The guy inside the Hummer - curly hair, T-shirt - gave the car a once-over. He opened his mouth to speak, and I was expecting an insult. Instead he asked, "How much did that cost?" I told him and he said: "That's not bad! It's cute!"
I said it was fun to drive, and that I expected to get about 40 miles a gallon out of it. "I'm leasing this," he said, gesturing at the mass of metal around him, "and I'm going to turn it in - I can't afford the gas!"
As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.
On the way home, I stopped for my first fill-up. The car had 278.5 miles on it; it took 6.813 gallons. A quick calculation showed I was getting almost 41 miles per gallon.
Not bad, I thought. Not bad.
There is just a feeling of specialness that goes with driving this car. In fact, it's a little weird to get out of it and walk. I've gotten so used to people staring that it seems odd to go back to the casual anonymity of the street.
Within a couple of weeks of my having brought the car home, it was no longer mine. Sam, my 17-year-old son, had commandeered it and was driving it to school every day. This has deprived me of precious driving time, so I've asked Sam to share some of his thoughts about driving the Smart. Here's what he had to say:
Driving around in the Smart car for the first few times reminded me of a living dream. You may have experienced this dream before, where you go through your normal routine and then once you're out of the house you come to the stunning realization that you have neglected to put on any clothes. Instead of turning back in search of cover, I guess in the interest of time, you figure things could be worse and continue on with your daily routine, ignoring the stares from everyone on the street. Driving a Smart car is like this dream, except it's a bit unrealistic. I do not believe people would be quite as affected by the sight of me walking naked down the street as they are by watching that shoe of a vehicle putter around town.
To put my experience in perspective, let me say that I do not live in an overtly friendly town. People generally mind their own business and make it pretty clear that they expect the same. This is why I found it a bit odd that as I drove down the street I saw smiles light up like an electric current running from the car to the people on the sidewalk. The reactions didn't stop there, though.
One man was shuffling across the crosswalk with a small dog and stopped at the other side to squint at my car. Maybe he couldn't believe his eyes or maybe he actually had to look for it after years of offensively large cars bulked up to the point where they can't help but be seen. Once he had determined that it was, in fact, a lovable jet-black boot-shaped vehicle, he flashed the widest grin the constraints of his face would allow and held a big thumb up in the air. I got the feeling I was being thanked, although I'm not sure what for.
I know, I know. He's a better writer than I am.