Cleats by Bill Hinds for June 10, 2008
June 09, 2008
June 11, 2008
Transcript:
Woman: A Smart car! That's so cute! You are the soccer mom for the new millenium. Woman: I'm not going to waste any more gasoline in those behemoth SUVs. Woman: But you only have room for one passenger, and you have three kids coming to soccer practice. Woman: I make several trips.
A company I used to work for had a couple of those. They actually don’t get particularly good mileage: low thirties city, high thirties highway. That’s not a lot better than a what traditional compact car got at the time this strip was written, and (as highlighted here) they’re far less practical. I think the company mostly just saw them as a rolling billboard that stood out in traffic, they covered them with our logos.
The main appeal of the Smart is that they can be parked in tight spaces, which is why they and their contemporaries are often called city cars. They appeal to people living in large cities where space is at a premium; parking them is much easier. The Smart Fortwo is so small, in fact, that it can fit in places not intended for automobiles. I had to take one of the company cars to pick up one of my coworkers one day. He was standing on the sidewalk, and as I was pulling up to it to let him in, he started laughing. When I asked him what was so funny, he pointed out that I was parked in the bike lane. Not ON the bike lane (straddling it), but IN the bike line: the car was narrow enough to fit inside of it.