Seen in the wild in the US
For the first time in my life I am planning to buy a car.
When I was 17 my parents gave me one, a hand-me down Ford Fiesta that my friends fondly recall as ‘Old Red’, a car that was herself 16 years old when I left Ireland and gave her away for scrap.
I moved to London and later to New York, two cities so well-served by public transport and so choked with traffic that I saw owning a car as a liability. But now Summer and I have moved to San Francisco and, while there are some deeply committed pedestrians and cyclists who live and work in the city, my new company will probably be based in the Valley, and so our carbon footprint will soon expand.
I am not sure that we have the strength of character to buy a Smart car though. I saw this one last night outside Terminal 1 at Oakland airport. A man standing next to me broke off his cellphone conversation and said "I don’t believe it, it’s a Smart car!"; a woman walking by said "Ohmygodasmartcarthat’ssocuuuuute!"; and another woman stared after it, looking very confused, and said to me "what kind of a car is that?" I told her that it was European. "Ah," she said, this being the only explanation she needed.
There may be more ivory-billed woodpeckers than Smart cars in America. The exclusive dealer, Zap, had sold just 300 of them as of September last year. (Note that they are the least odd-looking cars sold by Zap.) Perhaps SmartUSA will have more luck.
In Europe they are everywhere of course. In Barcelona last month I saw a convoy.
