A passion for the smart car

"A wallet-friendly, city-friendly, piece of pure road joy"

I fell in love with the idiosyncratic, distinctive two-seater Mercedes-Benz smart car ('smart' should never be capitalised -- it's the house style) when I made a film about it.

I was working as a free-lance producer for the BBC, making an academic programme for the Open University about the way Mercedes had re-thought the 'supply chain' -- and if that seems a bit dry, read on: it's an important part of the charm of smart!

 

 

We started filming at the UK launch of the right-hand drive smart, at the 2000 Motor Show. Already, the car was something of a cult, with several hundred owners who had imported cars from Europe -- and who had to take them back there for servicing, since the smart can only be serviced at specially designated and equipped 'smart centres'.

The Motor Show was also where they demonstrated for us that you can change the appearance of your smart, by fitting new body panels in less than 20 minutes!

The smart is not a small car -- it's a short car: the driver space is roomier than many conventional cars. But shortness of body has other advantages: in a collision, anything striking the body cannot avoid the 'safety cage' and you're more likely to survive, at least in a sideways impact. The geometry of the body is also carefully thought-out. It's (apparently) impossible to overturn the car -- although the demonstration of that, with me as passenger, when the smart test driver took one onto the track to try unsuccessfully to overturn it was one of the less engaging events of a week's filming!



It would be naive to deny that the name 'smart' was selected because it's one of those international, stylish words: but it also has its official deconstruction. 'Art' is essentially the German for 'style', and the name breaks down as s-m-art. 'M' is for Mercedes, but 'S' is for 'swatch'.

And it is this style-leading attitude to watches that Mercedes have brought to the motor car. With both watches and cars, the market has long been saturated -- anyone who wants one has got one, and the only market opportunities are in replacement and upgrading. But swatch rethought that: they re-positioned the watch as a fashion accessory, selling it as a second watch that you could wear just for particular occasions. While we're on about the deconstruction of names, most people think that 'swatch' is a contraction of 'Swiss watch'. Design drawings seen in the film show that the concept was 'second watch' -- although why Swiss designers with four languages of their own to choose from wanted to annotate their drawings in English is something we didn't discover!

Mercedes in partnership with swatch applied the same thinking to cars. Most car journeys are made with less than two passengers. But 'normal' cars can't have just two seats, because of that relatively rare occasions when you need to take grandmother on holiday! The smart approach was to design an innovative method of transport that was cheap enough to own in addition to a 'real' car. Make it quirky enough,and stylish, and it would become a self-promoting design classic. More about the quirks and the style later, but the Mercedes-swatch partnership foundered. The reasons are not clear, but there is a strong suggestion that swatch wanted to be even more innovative and radical, and create a hybrid electric/petrol engine. Mercedes were less keen, reasoning that their experience was in petrol and diesel engines and that too much innovation at the same time might be too risky. Whatever, MCC, the Microcompact Car Company who make smarts is now wholly owned by Mercedes, in turn part of the Daimler-Chrysler empire.

The resulting car is an eco-friendly 'fun', 'lifestyle' creation. As well as exemplary claimed fuel consumption,over 75% of the car is recyclable. You can choose your own body and interior colours and fittings over the Internet and -- as I satisfactorily proved -- you can afford to buy one with a credit card.



The 'fun', 'lifestyle' element of smart starts with the manufacture. The factory that produces the two-seater (now renamed the 'smart fortwo') is sited in Hambach, France, near to Strasbourg and close to the German border. It's called 'smartville', and is laid out in the shape of a 'plus' sign, with the four areas called 'earth', 'air', 'fire' and 'water'. A chassis starts at the top of the '+' and travels on a conveyor round the whole factory, gaining parts and fittings as it goes. The moment when the engine joins the body is known as the 'marriage' (our film's working title was 'A Marriage made in Hambach', but we later dropped this in favour of 'Brand New'). The stage immediately prior to the marriage is -- of course -- the engagement! Fittingly, the average age of the workforce (at least in 2000) was less than 30.

Since every vehicle that starts on the four-hour assembly journey has been sold to a specific customer, who has chosen the colour, the extras and the fittings, there's some pretty sophisticated computer work to make sure that when, for example, the doors are added, they're your choice of colour. But the true innovation here is just where the doors come from.



In the gaps between the arms of the '+', are located all the smart suppliers. MCC invited their key suppliers to re-locate with them to this brownfield site (the European money probably didn't hurt!) and instead of trucking in dashboards, engines and body panels from elsewhere, all the major components join the partially-completed body through tunnels linking the supplier factories to the assembly line. This process goes back some steps: the components for the doors are in turn manufactured in an adjacent plant. While it's a tremendous advantage to MCC to have suppliers close at hand -- and only being paid when a completed smart rolls off the line, as they do every 96 seconds -- you can over-emphasise this: some manufacturer, lower down the pecking order, will still be trucking their components in, even if they don't have to truck them out.



smart is a marketing dream! Although the UK hasn't capitalised on this is any way beyond the reduced car tax, elsewhere in Europe you get half-price car washes, and cheap motor-rail and ferry journeys. Two smarts can park in a single parking space. And where space permits, the icon that represents the dealerships is the 'smart tower', which is functional as well as eye-catching: it stores 27 of the dealer's stock! Even retail sales were re-thought: instead of dealerships on the outskirts of towns, smart went for city centre shops -- sorry, smart centres!

There's a lot more innovation in the smart concept -- after sales service, for example, with the entire life-story of every car carefully logged electronically by downloading the smart's on-board computer contents to Hambach on every service. But somewhere along the way, MCC lost the plot. The original two-seater smart replicated the Volkswagen Beetle's success -- by making it quirky, even ugly, it was noticed and became successful. smart added a roadster that bombed dramatically, despite Jeremy Clarkson's endorsement of it is the coolest car on the road. Then they added a smart four seater -- the 'forfour', made in Holland. While the 'fortwo' was idiosyncratic and fun to drive, the 'forfour' is just another, small and mundane vehicle. And the concept of the dedicated, city-centre smart centre was eroded: most smarts are now serviced at regular Mercedes-Benz dealerships.

So what's it like to own one? Fun definitely. Parking is a breeze, and I've even taken an otherwise inaccessible spot in High Street, Downham, by parking sideways. The luggage space is quite adequate for a week's holiday luggage and the gearbox -- a semi-automatic where gear selection is done through '+' and '-', rather than a conventional gearbox -- causes no problems. You are more aware of the quality of the road surface, and the big downside is that other drivers seem to think that because it's a short car, it's an irrelevant car -- I'm overtaken much more frequently and dangerously in the smart than in our 'real' car.

And disappointingly, the fuel consumption is nowhere near the claims. For the first couple of years, I logged the fuel consumption: best between fill ups was 60 mpg, but the worst was as low as 49. Over my ownership, it's averaged 55. In part, this is because of the way we use it. It's the car for the short trips into Downham, so it's perpetually running short distances from cold. And on long trips, because it can comfortably break motorway speed limits, you soon stop driving at an economical 55 mph.

But it's one of those cars where owners exchange headlamp flashes as they pass each other. The fun persists, even when the novelty dies away!