When Prius met smart

sounds like a novelty to me.... gonna do it .. do it right!

Ed "Big Daddy" Roth just rolled over in his grave!

 

When I was in Germany on vacation back in March I was surprised at how many of these I saw on the road over there. Once gas reaches, say $4-5 per gallon over here I suspect we'll start seeing more of them over here too.

BTW, is www.SmartCarisma.com in any way related to PriusChat? The layout of the site is eerily similar to PriusChat's.

 

Sorry to burst your bubble. But even if the market embraces a vehicle that small, there are still problems to deal with.

That diesel engine is going to be met by a lot of resistance from those wanting cleaner emissions, not dirtier. It's a step in the wrong direction until we see at least a SULEV rating.

And that amazingly slow 0 to 62.1 MPH in 19.8 seconds isn't going to attract the typical consumer.

So what kind of MPG does it actually deliver? That very important bit of info has been suspiciously absent from all but one of the articles recently published. And that one stated was... "The cars get somewhere between 50 and 60 miles per gallon" ...which is horribly vague.

 

Rented one from Budget a couple of weekends ago and drove it around for about 3 hours. Interesting car. Not a novelty in any sense. Just hate the diesel aspect of it. To say it can't keep up with normal traffic is BS, drove it on busy streets and then took it out on the freeway and it merged just fine and when I got P**sed off with how slow the traffic was going in the slow lane, about 60 MPH pulled into the left lane and passed about 15 cars then merged back in to the RH lane and took an exit back on to surface streets. What I thought was it's pretty coarse in the finish dept. Shifts are rough and the engine is fairly noisy back there and the ride is like my old Suzuki truck. As there are lots of them here now, I was interested in what the people who buy them are getting. Not really my cup of tea. Mercedes is selling them here in Canada thru their dealer network and when I go by the dealership they normally have a few on the lot or in the show room. The one thing you can't do is walk in and ask to take a test drive but your not interested in buying one, they just laugh at you so it was convenient that Budget had one their lot when we went by. Did 32Km on $1.32 worth of diesel.

Edited 3 times for stupid grammatical errors, sorry.

 

there are about 360 first generation Pruis in the whole province and I'd estimate at least 800 Smart for two's. You see a lot of them now and very few Prius. If you want an atipical city block, there are our two Prius and one Smart for two. On the drive home from work I saw 2 Smarts and no Prius, in 21Km., regional population is about 1.6 Million.

 

rear-mounted, direct injection, turbocharged, charge air cooled, 799-cc 3-cylinder, 40-horsepower, common rail diesel engine


And it was 19.7 seconds ( not 19.8 ). That's actually perfectly fine for normal merging, since the usual pace of traffic leads to longer than 20 anyway. But for rapid merging, forget it. The torque is likely impressive for quick lane changes, but for merging you need horsepower... which it seriously lacks.

At an an expected $21,000 sticker-price, I can't imagine it being competition with Prius. They are far too different.

 

If they were US$21000 I can't imagine them selling many of them. People would more likely get a Civic, Sentra, Focus or Scion for thousands less. If they went for, say US$10,000 I could see them selling quite a few.

The only reason to buy one of these over a Prius would be if you lived in an urban area where parking is a very big issue since you can almost park two of them in the space that one Prius would take. Other than that the Prius appears to be superior in every category at the same price point.

 

I took a female friend of mine to the Mercedes dealership on Broadway to have a look at the Smart cars. It was probably telling that she really didn't care about the fuel economy or the size, but was mostly interested because "it's cute".

Anyways, they didn't have one available for a test drive (but they offered to schedule us in). I found the interior design to be a bit plasticy and not quite up to scratch, compared to the Prius. Still, I suppose there is a market for them - saw two or three on the road yesterday.

Dave

 

If you are a third party importer I guess you just can't get the economies of scale needed to offer this at a more reasonable price point. At that price it will never be anything more than essentially a novelty.

 

I am not so sure this one is a good idea. Can you imagine a rear-end accident in this thing? There would be ZERO crumple zone space in the back. Instant death just about.

 

there is a crash movie on the smart website that shows it in a frontal crash with a Merc 300 and the Mercedes took the most damage. It's on a space frame like a race car and is quite strong. If your sick of the colour just change the panels and your Smart is a different colour. On the diesel models the emissions are a bit higher than a Prius, and the ICE is .8 vs 1.5L so the thing is dirtier than a Prius. I guess when Low Sulphur diesel is available maybe a bit better but NOx is still higher. Maybe with a scrubber it might come closer but until LS diesel is available it won't happen.

 

Since the price is comparable, the sole advantage of the Smart over Prius is exterior size - and in interior space and seating it's a serious DISadvantage.

It offers no other compelling feature - to buy ANY car because it's "cute" is irrational.