That's the actual car I think I want most in the world. It's so cheap and fun, and possibly even practical for me, but I don't think there's any way I could drive it in my city sadly.
Yeah, the "larger cars are safer for people inside the car but more likely to kill people outside the car" red queen race made roads even more terrible. In car like that, you would get ran over by a lifted truck or mama-SUV pretty quickly.
In the US you'd have to buy a bunch and put them through destructive crash tests to certify them, and I doubt these would pass - those smart cars actually have expensive high end steel structures built in that make them surprisingly resilient, and I doubt they do that in China.
If they had 3 wheels you could skip a lot of that and count it as a motorcycle. Also, anything older than 25 years basically just bypasses the rules which means a lot of 90's Kei cars from Japan are starting to make their way in, but obviously those are combustion powered (still cool though).
This leads me down a funny thought process of how would I make a cheap Chinese imported electric kart seem less safe so I could drive it down the street.
How would a car a small fraction of another car have non-obvious dangers in one-on-one collisions? If you think that a smaller mass object vs a much larger mass object is not going to do lots of damage to the smaller mass object, then a basic understanding of physics seems to be lacking. Then, tack on how much faster the larger mass object can be moving in comparison to the lower mass object, and tell me what's so non-obvious about that.
I wonder if there's a solution similar to experimental aeroplanes, e.g. a massive sticker which essentially says "THIS IS NOT A CERTIFIED PLANE, IT COULD BE DANGEROUS"
Looking at the way the "frame" is built on these, I'm not sure it would fare well in a crash with even a Fiat 500. It appears to have zero crash safety.
Oh wow, I didn't even know they made an electric smart, much less a convertible one. Not sure how good the EV part of that was (the article hints that it was terrible) but the form factor is really nice.
The Honda-e is not available at all in the US. The top line excuse is that side-view cameras are still not street legal in the US (though regulators are supposed to finally reconvene on that any day now) and the car's profile can't retrofit mirrors. But the current bottom line seems a disinterest from Honda of America in any EV products right now.
Its wheelbase is 8 inches longer than the Fiat 500, and it’s overall 10" longer. It’s by no means a big car, but it’s quite a bit bigger than a traditional city car.
Not nearly as cheap, but street legal in the US and looks like loads of fun.