While cruising with our family recently we passed what was once one of the largest volume Smart Car dealers in the country located in a town north of Boston, Massachusetts. I couldn’t help but notice that the place was jammed full of Mercedes Sprinter vans and not a single Smart car (unless they were being used as mobile storage units for the little weenie-mobiles). 

Seeing that, I was immediately curious about the year over year sales figures for Smart Cars. After all, they burst onto the American automotive landscape a couple years back. Manufactured by Mercedes and distributed by Roger Penske, the little car looked to be a giant killer and was hailed as the future of urban automotive transportation. 

Whenever people hail anything as “the future” it is time to be wary. The odd little cars had appeal to trendy urban buyers who were interested in both having the newest “thing” to be seen in and also to sooth their souls while telling all the other latte sipping members of their book club that they were getting 41mpg on the highway. Sure, contact with anything more significant than a nerf football may rearrange organs or worse, but they were getting 4 more MPG than a Mini, in half the car!

My eyes were not lying to me when I looked at the former Smart Car dealership north of Boston. Sales have gone from an average of about 2,600 cars per month in 2008 nationwide to 558 per month in 2010. That’s 558 cars nationally. Ford and Chevy are averaging roughly 300 Mustangs and Camaros each per day. 

The simple answer is that time and technology caught the car a lot faster than we guess Mercedes of Penske thought they would. Ford’s new Fiesta is touting 41mpg and is an actual car, albeit a small one, but in comparison to a Smart it is a 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood. 

What’s most curious to us is the complete and utter lack of mention this story is getting from the media at large. It was briefly touched on in the early parts of 2010 when sales looked to be in the tank, but after that, it is radio silence. You can only imagine the glee that the failure of the Mustang, Camaro, Challenger, Corvette, etc would be met with by the same people who were sucking the toes of the Smart when it was introduced on American shores.  

I’m not reveling in the apparent collapse and failure of the Smart car, but with such a launch and hype machine behind the release of the car in this country it is kind of a stunner to see it go down the tubes so quickly.

So what do you think? What killed the Smart Car?