To be fair, their crash performance is nothing short of spectacular for a small car - it's as good as a small Merc saloon/sedan. And achieving that in such a short length of car is very, very smart.
It's just all the rest that's dumb. It's meant to be a city car but they only seemed to make it short, not narrow. And while it is light, why try to make a fuel-efficient car that's short, high and wide - when long, low and narrow are what makes low drag.
I gotta say......
Every time I see a Smart car on the freeway doing 60 - 65 MPH, the very first thing I think of is how small they are to be playing "dodge em" out there amongst all those big semi's. Thinking they really belong as a "City car" and should stay in the city doing 20 - 25 MPH, and only needing to be worried about getting rear ended by some speeding courier on a bicycle.
When I was growing up in the 50's there were lots of very small cars sharing the road with all that large American iron and everybody got along just fine. Wonder why it is that today people feel like they're taking their lives in their hands to drive something other than a tank?
I think the American public better get used to small again, we're gonna have $4 gasoline next summer, and an influx of little cars from Mazda, Ford, Toyota and others. Personally, I'm all for it.....
Back then there were only two lane roads with some short sections of duel here and there. Nobody reached the sustained speeds we do today on the Interstate.
But isn't that derived because they are a "roll cage" with a body around it? They can't have much of a "crumple zone" to adsorb impact. The roll cage idea is fine, but something has to take the shock and I believe that would be the passengers.
Their just fine for what they were designed for; large European cities where parking space is at a premium. Still with a resale value that poor, anyone just short of brain dead would do well to buy used....
That is one area where the design is so clever. There is not actually that much crumple zone in most vehicles - look at the distance between your legs and the front bumper, and then deduct the engine block, becasue that don't crumple.
The Smart's whole architecture is to provide front and rear crumple zones without excessive length, which it achieves by putting the engine low down (at the rear) and the passengers high up - so in a major collision the engine and wheels can pass under the passengers without using any of their crumple zone.
But that made a tall car which is fine for visibility but bad for pretty much everything else - including its handling, which had to be hastily revised when the car was launched in the 90s as it failed the Swedish 'elk test' of swerving round an elk - it would fall over.
![[IMG]](https://www.motoringalliance.com/gallery/data/500/medium/Smart_Smash.PNG)
