My issue with large vehicles lies in the fact that most people aren’t actually using them for their largeness. I live in Florida and it is very common for people to drive SUVs and trucks, as it sounds much of America is like this. I would say around 90% (if not more) of the time I see a massive SUV or a truck there is only 1 passenger. The majority of the time I see trucks there is nothing they are hauling in the bed, honestly I cant ever remember the last time I saw something in the bed of someone’s truck. Trucks and SUVs surely have a purpose and I think it is a legitimate one, Trucks are great for pulling trailers and hauling loads of whatever and SUVs are great for hauling people, pulling trailers and hauling loads (minus the hummer which has neither lots of space for people or for hauling things), but I don’t think either are practical for day to day traffic. If you could only have 1 vehicle I think a trucks and SUVs are a waste of money and another hazard on the road. I am a firm believer that SUVs and trucks are making the roads less safe.
According to the US Census Bureau (2006), average family size is 3.14 [which includes parent(s)]. Even if the average family size was 4, you would still be able to haul your entire family in about anything other than a 2 passenger car like the smart. Truly though, most driving on a day to day basis from what I see peering into vehicles are people driving solo, with X amount of seats vacant. My thought has always been to drive a smaller/higher MPG car and when I need to haul things, rent a U-Haul or a truck. With all the money I would have saved in a year with a higher MPG car I would easily be able to justify the small amount is costs to rent a vehicle.
I think the real issue in our country is the lack of mass transportation other than road travel. I believe this is a lot to do with the way that American cities are so spread out from one another (but that’s another issue). smart may not be the most sound vehicle as a sole vehicle if you have children to haul around, but for a commuter car it is the direction our society needs to be headed. I am sick of this highway arms race; your low self esteem will not be fixed by driving the biggest vehicle you can find! I am off to buy a train and figure out how to put tires on it...Ill see you all on the road!
The review I saw that bothered me basically said it didn't compare to other vehicles, and then trashed the transmission because it didn't. I can't find the link for it, but there were 2 articles on the same source, one fairly favorable (he seemed to "get it"), but his partner's very negative. I thought they were on MSN, but can't find them again to quote them.
Well, the point for me is that I don't want it to compare to other cars, otherwise I would have kept the minivan and the SLK.
I wanted, craved something unique and unusual, something with "wow" factor. I could have moved up from my SLK to a CLK, but, while they are a beautiful car, the CLK looks like an awful lot like everything else on the road.
For the Smart to be practical, too, is just a lagniappe for me.
As for the reviewer trashing the way the car runs, did he drive the same model as I did? I think the shift paddles are brilliant. I drove the car fifty yards in automatic mode, said "ew yuck", and never looked back. It's paddles for me, baby, and I love 'em. He talked about them being jerky and inconvenient. Huh? He ranted about how it chugged slowing down at stops. Huh? How the upshift arrows were set wrong, blah blah, blah blah.
Well, I'm sorry if I'm huffy and unable to express myself properly about cars, but I'm a chick, I like cars, don't know that much about them, just what I like, but I was taught as a ten year old to drive a stick by feel and sound. If a professional reviewer, who is also, presumably a professional driver, can't get the same results out of the little car as I feel like I do, then give me his job. (Besides, I might get to meet Clarkson, May, and Hammond some day. Talk about 'yer lagniappes!!!!!! Sorry, an utterly chick response there. )
I figured out within the first mile or two to ignore the arrows, which are simply suggestions, imho. If silly little ole' me can figure that out, why can't the big bad reviewer? (*bats eyelids dangerously*)
By the time I got home from the dealer, I'd figured out that shifting UP when approaching a stop was the trick to the car, versus shifting down. The reviewer even said that the dealer had even mentioned this, but thought it was bad advice, and went on the complain about it jerking as he downshifted. Well, DUH!
Here's a car with some imagination and creativity, but he harps on it not running or driving compared to other cars.
I guess my point is, if everything's the same, and anything new is compared to everything else unfavorably simply because it is new, then what a dull dull world it will be.
I mean we're not talking Galileo and the Inquisition here, but for heaven's sake.... accept that things change and review it with an open mind. I guess I'm one of the "rabid" fans one reviewer so dismissively mentions, but I love my little car, and I can tell early on if a car "loves me back". The Yellow Peril does!!!!!
on your car, you will feel more comfortable with the automatic mode.
I had the exact same feeling about manual vs automatic mode and after breaking the car in mostly in the manual mode (so as not to lug the engine) I began to use the auto mode once in awhile and I found the it was much more user friendly once it learned my driving style or so it would seem. so now I switch back and forth from manual (using the stick) to auto and find total satisfaction with both modes in most situations.
It really is a phenomenal transmission if you think about how it will automatically shift down to 1st whenever you come to a stop in either the manual or the automatic mode. you can't stall the car out, either, like sometimes happens with a true clutch manual.
I really admire the way it operates now that it is broken in somewhat.
I ride a Buell, which for those of you not familiar with them it is an unholy marriage of a sportbike chassis with a Harley derived engine. It vibrates badly, doesn't have class leading power etc. The majority of the reviews are not favorable, but the bike is full of soul and I love it.
The smart is the same thing, you have to want to like it, if you can do that then you look at the flaws as "character" and you love the car. If you don't want to like the car, then there are no end of flaws you can focus on.
Ultimately the smart is not mainstream, so it is not surprising that the enthusiast magazines don't get it. It is not a car designed with their typical reader in mind.
I think the real issue in our country is the lack of mass transportation
It's not quite that simple. Europe has great mass transport because of the way it developed. They went from small villages of serfs nestled against a local lord's (the landowner) castle to cities nestled against the remains of a castle. European population centers are pretty much binary - when you leave town, there's not much until the next town. Private land ownership is still pretty much a new thing. Mass transport works well in this environment. Couple that with crippling taxes on vehicles and fuel by the governments and the picture is pretty much complete.
America (North, mostly) is a study in sprawl with the norm being private land ownership. Cities developed as trade centers and the majority of people lived apart from them on farms. mass transport, which needs hubs to be efficient) didn't have the population density outside of cities for it to work efficiently, and personal transport became the norm. By the time motorized vehicles came along, they just replaced the horse.
For those that wave the Mass Transport flag - please note that Europe is slowly adopting our model. The convenience factor of travelling at will is not to be lightly discounted.
If mass transit were conveniently available, more people here would use it. I most certainly would. In fact, I took the train to pick up my Smart, and walked the mile to the dealer.
Problem is here in Atlanta, as in many other cities, the rapid transit money is not used efficiently.
When I go to Europe, stations are generally basic and functional and are all over the place. The ones out in the 'burbs are essentially open platforms with a roof. That's all you need. And in some areas, you'll find five or more stations within a half mile radius.
MARTA, in it's great wisdom, put the stations miles apart from one another, generally not in residential areas, and primarily in inner city neighborhoods. Fat chance of walking to one. You have to drive to them, and if you are lucky enough to score a parking space, you have to be there by 7 am to do so.
The MARTA station directly acrost the street from my office could easily have been a platform/roof setup, been inexpensive to build, inexpensive to maintain, and they could have used the money saved to put additional stations in the three miles away in either direction til you reach the next.
But instead, I look out my window at a MASSIVE edifice which sits on either side of the street and a RR track, has two huge usually non-operative escalators and a urine soaked elevator to get up to the HUGE pedestrian bridge.
Then once you get to the other side, the ticket machines are so difficult to use, they have an employee who does nothing but help people put their money in and get a card. Oh, and should you lose the cheap paper card, or it wear out in your wallet, it costs you another $.50 cents to get a new one. Simple tokens, or coin machines were deemed inefficient. And let's not forget, the employee who shows you how to get your ticket also has to show you how to use it. YOu have to press it against a circle on the turnstile, and half the time, the circle doesn't recognize the ticket, and the employee ends up opening the handicapped gate to let you get through, since they know you PAID for the ticket, by virtue on the fact that they had to show you how to buy one! I kid you not!
Then you have to go back down to the platform level to catch the train, using either another pair of staircases, or yet another smelly elevator.
There is yet a second pedestrian bridge over the RR tracks on the other side of the station.
It makes no sense they spent millions and millions of dollars on each of these rail stations, when a simple platform and crosswalk would have accomplished the same thing.
Don't believe me? Everything with a red roof in this picture is a MARTA station. Note the extra parking lot, which has been closed off, btw. The location chosen for this station is at the main gate to a military base (the base personnell do NOT ride the train, it's too far to walk to anywhere in the base), and at an expressway. There are maybe 200 homes within any kind of walking distance, and only 2 businesses, mine, the small red roof in the middle bottom of the photo, and a liquor store a block down.
This is the kind of logic American transit people use when deciding where to set up rail stations.
I dont think we are brain washed as much as we are comfortable with the norm and no one wants to be the first to try new things.
I to am from Germany , from your screen name I would guess you are from Bremen , I spent a lot of time working there several years ago. While there I had a MB A Class diesel. Why because I knew that a big car would be more of a pain than a pleasure.
Last fall we went to Octoberfest and visited relatives near Frankfort, the car we rented was a MB 220 C class, why because I knew that I would be driving more longer distances. Even then when we went into the city we took the train. Parking alone would have been two or three times the cost of the train.
We here in America have not yet felt the pain, we moan a groan about the high gas prices but still get into our big cars all alone and drive to and from work everyday.
Our whole mind set is that bigger is better, is this due to advertising , mabey but in the end I still feel we the consumer is the driving force of the industry.
Humans are amazingly rational creatures if given the chance.
Marketing is designed to derail our common sense and push us into a purchase that we probably don't want and almost certainly don't need.
We "want" big cars and trucks because that's what Detroit has been marketing to us for 80+ years. The automobile market is not being driven by consumers, it is being driven by marketing.
Why? Because if you make something bigger and better, you can charge more for it! It's an upgrade, right? Upgrades are worth more! Don't just keep up with the Jones, get something bigger and better!
Americans switched to SUVs not because they fit our lifestyles better, or because they're more practical, or because we need them to haul around all of our crap. Americans switched to SUVs because the profit margin on them is dramatically better than on cars, and so Detroit's marketing machine convinced us that we wanted them so that they could make more profit.
MR Claudia, thanks for responding. I do not agree with you (oh, I love a good argument... :-) ... I seriously doubt it is the consumer who is driving the industry. That is what Detroit says and wants us to believe (most recently put force in an interview with Bob Lutz), that they are the good guys and would build small, fuel efficient cars, if only the buyers would want them. IMHO, it is brain-washing through ADVERTISING! How do most consumers find out about new cars? Most of us through advertising and possibly a write-up in a car or other magazine. That is how I found out about the VW EOS and I have lusted after it for 2 years, until my lease ended and I was able to buy the EOS in January. The Smart is my wife's car.
I also do admit to owning a big F250 Diesel truck. We used it to commute 75 miles every day. We no longer do. It has turned into a 3rd car, to be used when there is a need for it. If you live outside the city, a pickup truck comes in very handy.
You are correct. It's the manufacturer that are the driving force behind what we buy. Sure it's our money and it's up to us what we buy but if you look at the ads, especially on football Sunday, what do you see? Big burley men driving through construction sites with their brand new F350, Big Hummers going through the desert, Jeep Grand Cherokee ripping through the woods doing some hard core 4x4. ect. Are any of those 'real life' scenarios? No.
Humans are amazingly rational creatures if given the chance.
Marketing is designed to derail our common sense and push us into a purchase that we probably don't want and almost certainly don't need.
We "want" big cars and trucks because that's what Detroit has been marketing to us for 80+ years. The automobile market is not being driven by consumers, it is being driven by marketing.
Why? Because if you make something bigger and better, you can charge more for it! It's an upgrade, right? Upgrades are worth more! Don't just keep up with the Jones, get something bigger and better!
Americans switched to SUVs not because they fit our lifestyles better, or because they're more practical, or because we need them to haul around all of our crap. Americans switched to SUVs because the profit margin on them is dramatically better than on cars, and so Detroit's marketing machine convinced us that we wanted them so that they could make more profit.
It's that simple.
And we Americans have a real penchant for conspicuous consumption and it doesn't get much more consipicuous than a Black Cadillac Escalade EXT, Lincoln Nav, Hummer, Yukon Denali etc. These drivers hate smarts. Priuses and the like because it shows them for what they really are.
I fell in love with the small cars on my first trip to Ireland many years ago. I so wanted a nissan micro mini.
Having seen the smart the last two trips to Germany made me really want a small car. I drive 75 miles a day and know that gas is going to go higher and higher.
The politcal debates in my state for mass transit are non-stop. The train and bus system in Europe is the best. We really think on our next trip to Germany we are going to rely totally on trains and the bus. It is a no brainer. I have always wanted a train going up and down the I-95 corridor for us. We can't get a light rail going from the beach to Orlando. So many people would use it.
I have been reading the articles and they are so biased. I got 41 mpg yesterday!!! I love the transmission. It is a pc of cake and getting on and off the freeway is getting easier and easier as my confidence level goes up. I have noticed the suv and big pick up trucks do like to mess with me. I laugh when I fill up next to those big gas hogs. I do not think the Smart is a fad.
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