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Tiny Smart Car Coming To America

By Julie Busch / Tampa Tribune

Reporter Rich Mullins parks next to a Chevy Tahoe to show the small size of the Smart Cabriolet car he test-drove Oct. 24 in Clearwater Wednesday.

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By RICHARD MULLINS, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 25, 2007

A small German invasion is coming to the roads of America. A very, very small invasion.

In the next few months, the German car giant Mercedes Benz will start sales in America of its SmartCar, a vehicle that's smaller than some American golf carts, yet fully street legal in the United States.

Just over eight feet long, the two-seater SmartCar sports a three-cylinder engine the size of a beer cooler and goes 40 miles on a gallon of gas. Two SmartCars could fit bumper-to-bumper in normal American parking spaces, or one car could fit sideways.

'Wow, that is the cutest car in America; that is going to be my next car,' said Maki Kubba of Clearwater who spotted a SmartCar at a gas station during a Tampa Tribune test drive. Normally he drives a Hyundai Sante Fe SUV but wouldn't mind better gas mileage. 'I saw these before in London and waited for them to come here. ... I'll definitely have some questions about safety, but 95 percent of my driving is by myself, and just to work, and I don't want to burn so much gas.'

The Tampa Bay area is among the first few places where Mercedes and American distributors plan to sell the car. By next year, they likely will be sold at both Mercedes dealerships and stand-alone locations.

America won't likely give up its love of SUVs, and few Hummer owners are likely to trade in their rides for a SmartCar, said George Peterson, president of the auto consulting company Auto Pacific. He expects the car to generate a small, passionate following, however, akin to BMW's Mini Cooper or Toyota's Prius hybrid.

'It's a very unique thing,' Peterson said. 'I can see it selling well in highly congested urban places like New York, San Francisco or Boston, but preferably places without a lot of potholes, because you could lose one of these into a pothole.'

The car officially goes on sale in January, with a base model called Pure costing $12,000 (no radio or air conditioning), an upgraded Passion Coupe model at $14,000 and a convertible Passion Cabrio version at $17,000.

For now, the only U.S. model is a gas-powered version, but there are diesel versions available in other countries, and both hybrid and fully electric versions are in development.

Mercedes won't have the supersmall market all to itself. Recently, Honda introduced the Fit subcompact car, Nissan introduced the Versa and Toyota introduced the Yaris, which gets roughly the same gas mileage of the SmartCar. Sold outside the United States under the brand Tiida, the Versa has become Nissan's best-selling model.

Small, low-cost cars have abruptly become the next frontier for the global auto industry, after almost 20 years in which major car makers dismissed such vehicles as a low-profit afterthought. As gasoline prices keep rising, consumer tastes around the world are shifting toward smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. In the United States, drivers are trading in sport utility vehicles for smaller models. In developing markets, where sales are exploding, first-time drivers are starting out with the smallest, lowest-price cars.

Global demand for small cars is expected to grow by 30 percent to 27 million vehicles by 2013, with the growth coming mostly from developing markets, according to auto-research company CSM Worldwide Inc. Demand for big SUVs during that time is expected to drop 4 percent, to 10 million vehicles.

SmartCar will likely have some advantage from its association with Mercedes, which is building the car at a factory in France and has been selling the car in Europe since 1998. To make the car so small, Mercedes put the engine beneath and just behind the seats, and included more safety features such as airbags and a roll cage similar to race cars.

For the U.S. launch, Mercedes took the small approach too. Rather than launch a massive advertising push, Mercedes started spreading news of the car on auto blogs and started selling $99 reservations to buy the car at its Web site, smartusa .com. So far, Mercedes has taken more than 30,000 paid reservations.

'They need to convert those reservations into actual sales to real people, but if they convert half of those, that will be a good sales push for them,' Peterson said.

As for the ride, the car drives much like a full-sized Mercedes, and accelerates surprisingly well, said Scott O. Suits of Clearwater who races Mercedes cars and took a test drive Wednesday in Clearwater.

'Just outstanding,' Suits said, emerging from his test drive. 'It handled well and felt very solid. I drive a Mercedes E 320 station wagon, and I had just as much room in the driver seat.'

Information from The Wall Street Journal was used in this report. Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins

@tampatrib.com.

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