Argot Navis

I'm blogging from work. I think this is a first. I'm still not stupid enough to blog about work, but this is pretty adventurous for me.

Anyway, I was reading the Car Lust Blog (I actually generally read the Amazon version, not that it matters) and saw this post about respect for the Geo Metro. In that post, he links to a post in Rich Sloan's Amazon blog about the smart fortwo (I believe smart prefers the name all-lowercase). He gets attacked in the blog comments about the smart's gas mileage, but there are some concerns about the fortwo that I kind of want to ramble about to no one in particular.

First, in the interest of honesty, I will admit that I think the fortwo is a neat car. It's not really my style, but if they decided to import the ridiculous Brabus-tuned version to the States, I certainly wouldn't turn one down. So, the fact that I don't hate it probably influences how I see the arguments of those who do.

As a side note, I think blog comments, aside from YouTube comments, are probably the biggest venue for people to try to pass absurd opinions off as common sense. One of the comments on Rich Sloan's entry struck me as a particularly bad offender, but I'm not so sure now, so I'll take you through my thought process on it. Specifically, this sentence:

“My even older 1984 Honda gets over 42mpg, and delivers 0-60 in 3.3 seconds.”

A 1984 Honda getting 42 MPG really isn't all that outrageous. That's great gas mileage, but anything with a really small motor driven fairly conservatively will probably get good mileage. The other part, though, cannot possibly be true. For those of you who may not be all that familiar with 0-60 times, 3.3 seconds is a slightly faster time than Car and Driver managed to wring from their test Ferrari F430, a car just a bit more expensive and less fuel-efficient than an '84 Honda. To put it bluntly, 3.3 seconds is an impossibly fast 0-60 time for a car getting anywhere near 40 MPG. I'd wager that the actual 0-60 time for an '84 Honda is probably more than three times that. I, however, always like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and so I began to think, “Maybe he's talking about kilometers,” which would be strange considering he's from Atlanta, but stranger things have happened. Unfortunately, I'd still be willing to bet that an '84 Honda would take a few more seconds to hit 37 MPH. So then my common sense kicked in and told me he was probably not talking about a car at all, but a motorcycle (although it seems rather strange to compare a motorcycle to two cars without mentioning that you're talking about a bike). This is at least within the realm of sanity. Motorcycles are commonly both quite fast and quite fuel efficient compared to cars. I'd still be willing to bet that his 0-60 time is higher than he says it is, but maybe that's just me. I have no idea, though. If he is talking about a car, I don't think he's telling the truth.

But on to the smart. I've noticed that one of the complaints people have about the smart is its unimpressive fuel economy. I have mixed feelings about this, personally. On the one hand, they're right. 33/41 isn't amazingly good, considering the smart is basically designed for fuel economy. A lot of commenters seem not to be totally honest about this, though. This certainly isn't universal, and I don't even know if it's that common, but I've seen several people comparing the smart's 2008 EPA fuel economy estimate to the 2007 estimates of other cars as if they're . . . you know, actually comparable. They are not. Almost every car will have “less efficient” looking 2008 ratings. In 2007, the smart was EPA rated at 40/45. For comparison, the Toyota Yaris went from 34/40 to 29/36, the Honda Fit from 33/38 to 28/34 and the venerable Prius from 60/51 to 48/45. Again, the smart's fuel economy could probably be better — indeed, the older European smarts, especially the diesels, did manage better, but were also slower and, somehow, smaller — but compared to other economy cars, it is still quite good.

Another insult that tends to be thrown at the smart is that it's slow. Well, no argument from here on that one, but what else would you expect? If you want an extreme in one regard, you have to sacrifice in another. Look at the Lamborghini Murcielago (an impressive 9/15 in 2007) or, for another extreme, the Hummer H2, with fuel economy so good GM chooses, uh, not to tell anyone what it is. If you want truly good fuel economy, you're going to end up with a small, slow car. That's definitely a turn-off for me, but it has its advantages, even if you have to fill it up with 91 (heck, I have to fill my car up with 91, and I'm not getting that kind of mileage).

My favorite of the bunch, though, is safety. Apparently the smart is a “deathtrap.” I think this perception is a result of three things, really. First, the original smarts did not pass American safety standards, and had to be modified to pass. The new ones didn't pass impressively well, and the five star side impact rating obscures the fact that it isn't perfect in this regard. Still, it does pass current American safety standards. The second thing is that Americans still tend to have a belief that big cars are safe cars. My aunt provided a good example of this belief when my grandmother was buying a new car, by suggesting that my grandmother shouldn't get a small Japanese car, because they're unsafe. She should get a big, safe car, “like your old Malibu.” Now, there is no doubt in my mind that my grandmother's new Mazda3 is considerably safer than her old Malibu (I have no doubt that the smart is also safer than her old Malibu), but I think big cars do make a lot of people feel safer. Case in point, several commenters have brought up that they've seen the smart, and if it gets hit by a semi, the passengers are going to die. Apparently, none of them have stopped to consider that the passengers of a 9500 pound SUV would probably also die if hit by a semi. Really, the point here is that bigger really isn't always better. You might be safer in a bigger modern car, but you aren't horribly unsafe in a smart, and you're certainly safer than you would be in a big, old car that couldn't pass the safety tests the smart did.

The third thing gets its own paragraph, because it relates to most of these concerns. I think a lot of people don't totally get what the smart is. So, let's take a look. We have a car that costs about $12,000, seats two, is extremely small and has a top speed of 90 MPH. It's not really a highway cruiser or a family car. Sure, you can drive it on the highway, but like a lot of other super-economy cars, notably the Prius, this really isn't what the smart is suited for. It's a city car, for sure. You can park it pretty much anywhere, get reasonably good city mileage (although hybrids are much better for this, since they usually have better city fuel economy than highway), and the smart is fairly comfortable at city speeds. Also, it's less likely that you'll be involved in a high-speed collision in the city, which sort of diminishes a lot of the safety concerns (especially compared to, say, a bicycle). All in all, I think for a city driver, it's a perfectly fine car. If you have to drive in the city.

Anyway, I'm done ranting about that for now. Feel free to comment and tell me why I'm an idiot.