I was downtown last week and there it was, parked on Fleming across from the Post Office, a red and black smartfortwo, the new 1000cc, three cylinder Mercedez Benz Smart Car. I called my wife who has developed a wild passion for these cars and who put down a $99 deposit for one last year. In fact when we were in Italy last June we hunted down a Smart dealer near Terni and took one for a ride, a red and silver one as it happens.
They call the chassis frame members a "tridiron" in smartspeak and those frames come in silver or black. The rest of the bodywork is plastic paneling that can be changed by simply unscrewing the various panels and attaching new colors of your choice. A nice way to eliminate dings and scratches...These 40 mile per gallon cars were conceived as urban transport and the original Smarts were 600cc, six foot long cars that could park rear to the curb in half the space of a "normal" car. In Italy they sometimes end up in motorcycle parking!
These newer models are 8foot 8inches long, hit 90 miles per hour and come complete with heated seats, air conditioning and full sound systems.
The entire vehicle is designed around the cabin which is the same size as a regular car's front seats, but the rest of the vehicle is a tad bit shorter.
I found the Smart pleasant to drive, a bit clunky in automatic and but smoother with the manual clutchless shifter so beloved of modern sporting cars. It picks up okay, but not brilliantly, and feels the bumps more than a longer car might but its a very usable vehicle incorporating a modest but adequate trunk. In some respects it is a worthy successor to the venerable Fiat 500, a simple car that offered no frills, a clunky gearbox (double declutch first gear!) and got people on the road even if they had little money.
The Cinquecento by Fiat has become an icon such that Florentine jewellers were selling them as trinkets on the Ponte Vecchio when I was visiting last year. Fiat has produced a new, more comfortable 500 as part of the new/old retro wave of automobiles led by the VW Bug and BMW's Mini, but my sister still has her original Fiat 500 in perfect condition and won't drive it anymore because she's shy and says it attracts too much attention! 
Modern Europeans are spoiled for choice when it comes to attractive small cars and my wife, while passing these paragons of economy on the pillion of my friend Giovanni's much more robust BMW 1200 two wheeler, took a fancy to Nissan's (convertible) Micra as her favorite.
For myself I still like the original urban machines, like this Vespa lurking in a Florentine alley,
or the BMW 650 I rented last June, seen here at the castle at Alviano near Orvieto: 
And modest scooters of all stripes still stir my heart more than micro cars:
Inside the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera, Tuscany, there are all sorts of vehicles that speak of Italy's need for wheels in the wake of World War Two. Piaggio's Ape (ahh-pay) is still seen everywhere on modern roads in Italy and the Third World including India where they still build them; it's a classic three wheeled workhorse. My wife cracked herself up sitting in my sister's Ape 50 "moped:"
The fruit vendor used to make his rounds in my Umbrian village driving an Ape 30 years ago, weighing the fruits and vegetables in a hand-held set of scales. And I remember the Vespa 400, real micro cars on the streets of Italy in the 60's and 70's. Now they are relegated to museums, the Smart car of their day:
And here's a gratuitous motorcycle picture, a heart throb if I ever I saw one, a Gilera single at the Piaggio museum:
Take that you urban poseurs! It would undoubtedly be hell to ride on modern city streets, but the image is lovely nonetheless, for those of us that dream unfettered dreams. 
My wife still dreams of owning a Smartfortwo convertible, she has her colors picked out, metallic blue on a silver tridiron, with the comfort package, out the door including sales tax for $20,000... but its not going to happen. And its a shame because this is the first car I've ever seen her really passionate about.We went to the Ft Lauderdale dealership, newly opened on Weston Drive this weekend, where a couple of squeaky young coeds were taking enthusiastic visitors out for a miniscule test drive round the industrial park. I had hoped to see how the Smart car coped with modern American traffic but no such luck. When I wanted to talk prices the coed asked if we had a reservation. Yes I replied, we put $99 dollars down (fully refundable)... and had we gotten an e-mail announcing "our" car was under construction in the french factory?...Not that I remember. Well, she said the wait is currently 8 months as we had apparently missed our turn. 
This was not a showroom in the normal sense of the word. This was a throwback to the East German style of selling Trabants, the smoky two stroke cars that passed for transportation in the former Worker's Paradise. You got what you were given which was whatever the Party thought you deserved to receive, and were happy to get anything at all, never mind the color of the body or the number of doors. The coed remarked how nice the Key West buyers had been when they received their cars, a Cabriolet instead of the Passion and how they had kindly taken what they were given (for $3,000 more- no discounts for French shipping errors!).
This was not a showroom in the normal sense of the word. This was a throwback to the East German style of selling Trabants, the smoky two stroke cars that passed for transportation in the former Worker's Paradise. You got what you were given which was whatever the Party thought you deserved to receive, and were happy to get anything at all, never mind the color of the body or the number of doors. The coed remarked how nice the Key West buyers had been when they received their cars, a Cabriolet instead of the Passion and how they had kindly taken what they were given (for $3,000 more- no discounts for French shipping errors!).I wish Smartfortwo all the best in the US, and I hope for their sakes there are enough hip arrivistes around to keep the waiting lists long. I guess there is no hope for overtime in the 35 hour-per-week French workers' paradise to clear the backlog! Me? I'm happy with the Sebring convertible and my wife is asking for her $99 back, thanks. She's certain when the fad wears off there will be a glut of lightly used Smart cars given up by people who change their minds and decide something a tad bigger than a Smart car might be a smart idea. My wife loves to hunt bargains. And then I saw this example of two true Keys cars:
Take your pick, the wildly over decorated Honda or the dull old family van with the perfect coastal exploration tool on top. Try hauling a kayak on your Smart car, you smart people!
