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The beginning of April marked the 10-year-anniversary of when my wife and I picked up our smart convertible.
We'd seen a smart for the first time in Amsterdam in May 2001 and while we were hardly in the market for a new car, I thought that with the price of gas going up over $1.50, a little car like that might be pretty economical in the future, apart from the fact that it looked pretty cool.
I spent several years following the gray-market smarts that were imported into the USA, but at $30K each, they were way out of our reach, although the City of Portland bought several. I managed to get interviewed by the "Car Talk" guys asking about how to get a smart—they were pretty dismissive about it and the segment never aired.
In the spring of 2007, the announcement came out that smart was going to enter the US market, and we put down our $99 pre-order. Two months later I was laid off from my job, but I still picked the car up the next spring, even though I was just doing some freelancing. In the winter of 2008, we took the smart to the beach for an anniversary party.
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In the intervening decade, a hit-and-run driver who was road-raging with some girls in the next lane rear-ended the smart at a stop light. My wife and I were near the end of a day driving up from San Francisco along the coast in 2012 when a deer jumped across an otherwise empty road, hit the front on the driver's side and slid up the windshield toward the open top (we managed to drive 500 miles home the next day). The day after the 2016 election, a rotten tree branch fell on the roof, crushing a couple of the struts. But it's still going after 108,000 miles, and we've got the top down every chance we get.
We'd seen a smart for the first time in Amsterdam in May 2001 and while we were hardly in the market for a new car, I thought that with the price of gas going up over $1.50, a little car like that might be pretty economical in the future, apart from the fact that it looked pretty cool.
I spent several years following the gray-market smarts that were imported into the USA, but at $30K each, they were way out of our reach, although the City of Portland bought several. I managed to get interviewed by the "Car Talk" guys asking about how to get a smart—they were pretty dismissive about it and the segment never aired.
In the spring of 2007, the announcement came out that smart was going to enter the US market, and we put down our $99 pre-order. Two months later I was laid off from my job, but I still picked the car up the next spring, even though I was just doing some freelancing. In the winter of 2008, we took the smart to the beach for an anniversary party.
In the intervening decade, a hit-and-run driver who was road-raging with some girls in the next lane rear-ended the smart at a stop light. My wife and I were near the end of a day driving up from San Francisco along the coast in 2012 when a deer jumped across an otherwise empty road, hit the front on the driver's side and slid up the windshield toward the open top (we managed to drive 500 miles home the next day). The day after the 2016 election, a rotten tree branch fell on the roof, crushing a couple of the struts. But it's still going after 108,000 miles, and we've got the top down every chance we get.
