The smart® car

The most obvious sign of a car designed with conservation issues in mind is perhaps the smart® car (the lower case s is intentional, apparently). This car of only 2.5 metres length is certainly eyecatching, if not on aesthetic grounds.

Strangely, it has its origins with Nicolas Hayek, the CEO of Swatch, the Swiss watch company. Meaning at first to collaborate with Volkswagen, they ended up with Daimler-Benz. The word smart was meant to stand for Swatch Mercedes ART, with perhaps a glance at the English meanings of smart as “clever” and “attractive”.  You do have to be thoughtful about languages and trade marks. When it comes to cars, Rolls Royce decided not to name a new car the Silver Mist when someone pointed out that “mist” meant manure in German, while Ford’s Pinto did not sound very macho in Brazil where the word means in local slang (small) men’s privates (It was later renamed).

The idea was a compact, affordable car for two occupants that would be easy to park and that would have innovative features. It had to be able to "transport two people and a case of beer". A feasibility study began in 1993. Many patents came out, of which the most distinctive one, filed in 1995, was US 5688021, “Body for a passenger vehicle, especially for a small car”, my Patent of the Month

Four inventors were credited, and it was filed in the name of Micro Compact Car Gmbh (It changed to Smart Gmbh in 2002 before being absorbed into Mercedes-Benz in 2006. Swatch is no longer associated with it).

The patent is for making the car modular, so that different parts can easily be repaired or replaced. The abstract in the patent says “the load-bearing structure of the body is formed by what is referred to as a "space-frame" structure. In the floor region and in the side region behind the doors, surface elements are integrated in a sealing and permanent manner into the framework structure and are in part closed off by window panes inserted in a sealing manner or by a roof inserted in a sealing manner”. It envisaged customers asking for customisation, or making small runs of modified models, and this being easy, even up to the day of delivery. Damaged pieces can easily be replaced, or you can change the colour. Much of the patent document is easy and interesting to read.

A light vehicle is particularly vulnerable in crashes as force equals mass x acceleration. The car has a steel “Tridion” safety cage which encloses the interior of the car and also forms the bulk of the Smart's chassis. A small energy-absorbing crumple zone at the front of the car lessens impacts.  While a light car will never be as safe for the occupants as a larger vehicle, the Tridion shell holds up remarkably well in crash tests. Television’s "Top Gear" showed that the Smart Fortwo's body remained mostly intact in a 110 kph crash test when compared to that of a conventional subcompact car. That sort of sudden deceleration injury to car occupants in just about any vehicle, of course.

It has been suggested that a safety feature is that the occupants sit up high, so that energy from a collision is safely dissipated below them. Drivers feel that the narrowness of the car, and the close proximity of the rear window, mean that there are few blind spots.
A purpose-built factory complex, Smartville, was built in Lorraine, France in 1994. The car was launched at a car show in 1997 and has been sold widely across Europe since 1998 – some 750,000 of them. The smart fortwo model range costs about £6,900 to £15,470, depending on extras.

Things have not worked out as Nicolas Hayek had hoped. The result was certainly a 3-cylinder, rear-engined car with good fuel economy that was easy to park. Its turning circle is just 8.7 metres. Three of them can park nose to pavement, where one normal car would park lengthways. However, the car is not cheap despite not being produced with the innovative engines hoped for. The 80 plus patented innovations must have cost money, and it is difficult and expensive to shoehorn a lot into a small frame. Placing the engine beneath the (already small) rear boot was perhaps essential but must have caused endless engineering problems.
Estimates are that between 2003 and 2006 the car lost close to 4 billion Euros (The Mini too sold at a loss, as the car was priced below the actual cost of manufacture). Using a cheaper location to manufacture the car might have been a shrewd move.

Until now the car has not been available in the United States, reportedly because the “big is beautiful” market was thought to be a tough one to crack. It will be launched there in January 2008 and this is causing a lot of excitement on the Web. They will be conventional gasoline engines, although there are some electric version cars in Europe. There is talk of whether or not large Americans can fit in the car (yes, says a blogger who’s checked) and whether or not the occupants would be “dead meat” in a crash (no, says the same blogger, citing the in-built safety precautions). In addition, the US authorities have insisted on 90 modifications before sale both for safety (such as an aluminium safety bar) and to control emissions.

Despite the claims to be so modular in the patent – which were perhaps not as successful as was hoped – a company in California, ZAP, is carrying out these modifications on imported models. Over $100 million of advance orders for what is perceived as a cheap car have been received. Prices will be from $12,000 for basic models. We will have to see if a car designed for European cities will be a success in a land where Web comments say it is too dangerous for American streets.