Smart Car of America - Micro-Cars Gain a Toehold

Micro-Cars Gain a Toehold

More and more, these manufacturers are looking for buyers among professionals and homemakers who just want to get around the narrow lanes of villages from Tuscany to Touraine.

European manufacturers of conventional small cars, like Renault in France, Volkswagen in Germany and Fiat in Italy, have poured billions of dollars into small-car development in recent years, paying little note to the voiturettes. But in October, fresh attention will focus on the market for two-seaters when Mercedes-Benz, a unit of Daimler-Benz of Germany, becomes the first large auto maker to enter the market with a fully equipped model called the Smart Car, which it developed with SMH, the Swiss conglomerate that makes Swatches.

The makers of conventional cars say they are not fazed. ''Our products are significantly different,'' said Luc Bastard, a spokesman for the Association of European Automobile Manufacturers in Brussels. ''They are not really competing.''

Others are less sure. ''This is an interesting market,'' said Nigel Griffith, head of automotive research at DRI/McGraw Hill in London, ''because very few people know about it.''

Several changes combined to breathe fresh life into the voiturette industry, a Lilliputian copy of the mainstream automobile business.

In the late 1970's, public transport in the French countryside declined as the state railway cut back underused routes, prompting several French companies to try their hand at building small cars for elderly people who were stranded in the country without a driver's license. French law specified that anyone 14 and older, license or no, could drive a motorized vehicle with an engine capacity of less than 50 cubic centimeters. (The age limit has since been lifted to 16.)

In 1981, a pleasure-boat manufacturer named Jeanneau in this village about 50 miles from the Atlantic coast decided to adapt its skills with fiberglass paneling and motors to produce a four-wheeled vehicle that it dubbed the Microcar. ''The law didn't mention the number of wheels, or anything else,'' said Dominique Mathon, the Microcar division's managing director. Two years ago, after Jeanneau was acquired by the big French yacht builder Beneteau, best known in the United States for its sleek sailboats, it joined several other voiturette makers to lobby the European Union for laws that would make any voiturette model that was approved in one European country automatically marketable in all 14 other member states. Read the whole article...Click Here

SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS SECTION NEW YORK TIMES

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