The SMART CAR OF AMERICA community is a social utility that connects you with fellow smart enthusiasts.
You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community you will have access to post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today!
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us.
Start your day out right, read the comments in this article..
Looks like the county of San Bernardino, CA tested 3 smarts for a year and ended up not liking them for various reasons. What gets me is once again is the incredible amount of reader comments bashing it with the normal stupid comments we hear so often. If I were to stereotype CA residents the way these people stereotype the car, I would think everyone in CA is an idiot (which is not the case).
At least one smart owner chimed in....and no it wasn't me.
it was so small and low that with me on my low rider, I could see ALL of it
Since the smart is taller than 90% of the sedans out there, I wonder what this guy's perception of "low" really is. Perhaps he means "short in length."
Quote:
All of them are built in Germany.
... almost there.
Quote:
Those are expensive cars, too.
I'm still paying for mine. If I can't pay for it with loose change, it must be expensive... (?)
___________
Quite the hodge-podge of common ignorance (please read that of "lack of informed knowledge"). Personally, I prefer to know enough about something before I support or criticize it. But then I'm smart enough to know a smart is great choice for some people.
Thought about it and when you look at any newspaper comment sections it always seems that 4 out of 5 people have some ignorant comment that has no research behind their statement whatsoever.
We get what we pay for - millions of dollars to somebody who can throw a ball, while the people we trust to educate ours kid are lucky to make $50K a year. What do we expect?
Let's look at how brilliant the County acted on this purchase: 1) they bought a boutique car as a fleet service vehicle, 2) they bought the upscale model (Passion) over the base (Pure), that adds things like heated leather leather seats and alloy wheels - this is a $4k difference a base model which would accomodate county needs just fine, and finally...
the car would probably get the manufacturer's MPG rating if the county employees didn't drive the hamster wheel like they stole it. I'm sure they get in this tiny thing and floor it for all it's worth! The car is supposedly engineered by Mercedes Benz (true fact), so it can't be total junk like a Yugo of the 80's. But if the county says otherwise, then it must be gospel.
If anyone wants to see a county employee in action on the job, here is a recent pic of employee while on the freeway chatting away. No handsfree device either: http://i48.tinypic.com/311s40l.jpg
Your tax dollars "at work". The fleet supervisor who saw a Smart car as a "smart" purchase should be re-examined. Taxpayers enjoy seeing their money wasted like this. Not that the Smart car is inferior, it's just not suited for practical county business. The car has to be able to haul lard ash loads along with all of a county employee's belongings and their business effects.
This person really isn't for or against the smart, but does their homework and acutally THINKS!
Looks like the county of San Bernardino, CA tested 3 smarts for a year and ended up not liking them for various reasons. What gets me is once again is the incredible amount of reader comments bashing it with the normal stupid comments we hear so often. If I were to stereotype CA residents the way these people stereotype the car, I would think everyone in CA is an idiot (which is not the case).
At least one smart owner chimed in....and no it wasn't me.
This is not to defend the particular California idiots who posted most of the comments on that article, but if the article were written in any other U.S. county, I bet that you'd get a similar display of ignorance and stupidity. Stupidity respects no boundaries, geographic or otherwise.
This is not to defend the particular California idiots who posted most of the comments on that article, but if the article were written in any other U.S. county, I bet that you'd get a similar display of ignorance and stupidity. Stupidity respects no boundaries, geographic or otherwise.
SOOOOO TRUE! You should see the comments on our local online paper here.
This person really isn't for or against the smart, but does their homework and actually THINKS!
One thing that did stick out to me was the $4k premium over the Pure with the Passion. Not the case. They make it sound like every Passion has heated leather.
Let me tell you about San Bernadino. When I was in college at LMU (circa 2000) I used to DJ trance/progressive house in my spare time. One summer night after the semester ended, my DJ buddies and I decided to blow off some steam, so we packed up a couple of self-powered monitors, a generator, some scrap wood, turntables, and our record boxes and headed off for El Mirage Dry Lake Bed, which I found out was in San Bernadino County. It is basically a huge empty expanse of nothingness where people go for two reasons: to spin records and dance, or to drive around in mad-max style vehicles. We were expecting the same thing as the other times we'd went to El Mirage: spinning records and dancing until the sunrise around a camp fire with maybe 5-15 buddies. Was I in for a surprise.
Before we went I set up my voicemail with some directions to the spot and we each invited a few friends to come along and enjoy the music. Turns out someone somewhere posted it to a site called Ravelinks, hyping it up as a "party for the hard core underground ravers" and my phone started ringing off the hook. I should have stopped there. When we got there, it was just us 4, and we started setting up as the sun was going down.
When it got dark, it was finally time to turn on the generator and do a sound check. As I was walking to the generator, a flood of lights started pouring into the lake bed and coming towards us. I thought "holy carp we don't have enough wattage to play to a crowd that big with our little self-powered monitors!". As the cars got closer at high-speed and started skidding to a halt around me, I realized they were all marked and unmarked cop cars-about 20 of them all full of people. There were were, 4 college guys with our records, suddenly blinded by the floodlights on 20 cop cars like something out of a heist movie. Except we were not bank robbers.
Turns out San Bernadino County had an ANTI-RAVE-TASKFORCE consisting of just about every law enforcement agency in the county. They told us that we could all go to jail under the new "Crack House Laws" that enabled cops to charge people who run "crackhouses" as drug dealers, since we were planning on playing electronic music, which is apparently drug paraphanalea. They proceeded to illegally search our cars without a warrent and put each of us in the custody of a different enforcement agency. I was lucky I was put into the custody of the park rangers. One of the other 3 was arrested for being on drugs he was not on, while the park ranger merely slapped me with a $50 fine for bringing a glass container into a park. He was actually pretty cool and told me he'd rather be busting the guys with the mad max vehicles in the distance for damaging the lake bed.
After a couple of hours what seemed like the county's entire police force (if you ever want to rob a bank in San Bernadino just post a rave on Ravelinks) wrapped up their search and interrogations and told us that they were annoyed they came out all that way to not be able to round up a big rave, but that if we had had anyone come, we'd be in jail on drugs charges because of our terribly dangerous music, and never to return to San Bernadino County. To this day I never have.
Every now and then when I'm at an EDM event here in the Bay Area I tell that story to someone and they say "hey I think I was trying to go to that one, but they had illuminated construction signs on the highway saying "Ravers Go Home".
Something tells me that San Bernadino County is not a very smart-friendly place.
"
You should see the comments on our local online paper here.
Today
Linear Mode
