Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [71]
I have one or two other minor criticisms. The tachometer, mounted in a sort of robot's eyeball thing on top of the dash, can be swivelled away from your line of sight. Why? So your passenger can keep an eye on the revs for you? And why must cheeky little cars always have cheeky little horns? The Smart's hooter sounds like the battery-operated Pifco item I had on my childhood bicycle and for some reason seems to be directed into the cabin rather than outwards from underneath where the bonnet would be if the Smart had one. Toot-toot! Hello, said Noddy.
Otherwise, driving the Smart on a long journey is a bit like driving a car. The seating position is good, the radio works and the mechanicals thrum away fairly unobtrusively. It's surprisingly comfortable. In fact, from the driving seat it is easy to forget that the Smart is such a small car, because the view forward is like that out of a mid-size MPV.
But then, the Smart isn't really a small car at all, just a very short one. The original Mini or Cinquecento is a truly small car: a proper four-seat car built to a slightly smaller scale than a normal one. The Smart is to the same scale as an A-class Merc; it's just that, like so many things in life, it comes to a rather abrupt end.
Shortness has its advantages – it's obviously good for parallel parking – but a few busy French towns reveal that shortness counts for Jacques Sheet in terms of traffic-busting capability. In a traffic jam, the eight-foot, two-and-a-half-inch Smart has to wait in line just as the 17-foot Bentley does, because the length of the road is not the issue. To beat congestion you need to be narrow, which is why couriers ride motorcycles.
But it does get there. After 10 hours of autoroute, routes nationales, evil coffees and restorative games of bébéfoot, we arrived at Smartville. It's a large and very modern complex shaped like a giant plus sign and clad in white tiles, which can presumably be changed for red ones if they get fed up with it. Completed and brightly painted Smarts spill out of the end of one arm like, well, Smarties. Touring the plant, you have to be careful not to step on the moving rubber roadway or you could end up back outside again.
At the centre of the plus sign is a large, open-plan training and fault-rectification area where we parked our black Smart. Trolleyloads of replacement panel sets like Airfix model components were wheeled out for my consideration. It's a bit like buying a new pair of shoes, really. It occurred to me that the Smart would be a great car to buy in kit form since, like Camelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it's only a model.
I quite liked the red panels, but then realised that the thick strut that would be the B pillar if the Smart were a complete car would always be black, as it's part of the Tridion safety frame that forms the rigid core of the thing. Didn't really go, so I sent those away.
Silver was quite nice too, but having gone all that way I fancied something a bit more radical. Eventually, realising that it wasn't my car anyway, I selected something called Numeric Blue. The raffishly named and immensely patient Gerard Frangart and Raphael Marques shouldered me aside, went at the Smart with power tools and fists and, not much more than 30 minutes later, we had something in pale blue and plastered with random numbers. Absurd, really, because the V5 registration document still says it's black.
Within a few miles of beginning the return journey I began to suspect that the whole thing was a terrible mistake. Confirmation came at a roadside burger van, whose proprietor was careful to establish that we worked for a good manly