The small car with big ideas Smart Car seems to defy every vehicle convention -- and runs on the fuel of transport trucks

Its drivers love the Smart Car with a zeal known only to revolutionaries. Their goal is to downsize Canada's roadways and ease the atmosphere's mounting burden. It's a tall order, a very small car, a very big mission.

Even on the highway, Kelly James feels as if she's driving a car like any other -- until she turns to look out the rear window.

"Then you realize there's nothing behind you," says James, whose two-seat Smart Car is 2.5 metres bumper-to-bumper, two metres shorter than many SUVs. "That's when you go, 'Oh yeah, I'm a little car.'"


The 2008 Smart for two has gone through a makeover to ensure it appeals to North American tastes.
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The Smart Car, made by Daimler AG, seems to defy every car convention: it's tiny and square and runs on diesel, the fuel of transport trucks.

What's more, the car seems perfectly unsuited to Canadian winters: it's smaller than a snow bank. A hockey bag has to ride shotgun in the passenger's seat.

Smart Cars are the smallest of a popular new breed of gas-sipping cars in Canada, which include the Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Nissan Versa and the Mini Cooper. The subcompacts -- they have almost doubled their sales in this country during the past decade -- hold the potential to slow the growth in emissions from Canada's transportation sector.

"It doesn't make sense when you see one person driving an SUV, a vehicle that can hold six or eight people," James says. "Doesn't it makes more sense to drive something small?"

To understand how radical that notion is, it's necessary to study some history: in particular the rise of the SUV, which came to dominate the Canadian automobile market in the 1990s. In that decade, car sales fell as motorists replaced passenger vehicles with SUVs, minivans and pickups, which federal statisticians categorize as "light trucks."

In 2005, 7.6 million light trucks were in service -- triple the number on Canadian roads in 1990.

Some Canadians bought SUVs simply as a defensive measure since it was hard for anyone to feel safe in a subcompact that stared into the grille of a Cadillac Escalade. Vehicles kept getting bigger as drivers sought new advantage.

Last year, light trucks enjoyed record sales in Canada: 803,000 vehicles.

James believes Smart drivers are in the vanguard of change. In arrestingly small cars, they've launched their own motorized shock therapy, one designed to reclaim the road for more modest vehicles.

James says her car regularly affords her the chance to proselytize: "I think because the Smart stands out, people notice it more and they ask questions."

Ottawa communications consultant Derek Ellis says his Smart Car often draws a crowd outside the mall.

"When my wife and I go to Costco, people will wait to watch us put stuff in the car: they think we'll never get that in," says Ellis, 58. "But it's amazing what will fit."

The car, he says, changes a driver's daily experience. Parking lots are never full -- he has parked beside garbage cans and nose-first between cars -- and the road is a more collegial place. "It's a bit of a cult thing," Ellis says.

"The Smarty drivers that I've passed, they've never not waved at me or given a thumbs up."