Wow.

This is rather interesting.

From what I gather, the itty-bitty Smart Fortwo, which seats a grand total of…hmmm…two people, can actually fit 13. That’s, uh, a lot more than I expected.

This event was held to celebrate Smart’s 10th anniversary, and anyone could participate. The winners of the contest were a bunch of contortionists, and they managed to fit 13 of them inside the little car. If you haven’t seen a Smart Fortwo before, here are some measurements:

The car is 2.7 by 1.6 meters, which in English translates to 8.8 feet long, or about 8 feet 10 inches by 5.2 feet wide, which is about 5 feet 2 inches. That means, for me at least, I can stretch my arms and be wider than the car, and I’m just about two and a half feet shy of being as tall as the car is long. I can also take three steps and have walked farther than the car’s length.

It’s actually rather hard to explain how small it is until you see it in person, and I have, so how these people managed to fit 13 of themselves inside is beyond me.

Another pic after the jump: Continue Reading…

ee-YOW!!

What you see here is, essentially, a real-world crash test of the much loved (by some) Mercedes Benz Smart ForTwo city car.

This comes by way of CarScoop by way of Jalopnik, and it happened somewhere in North America (there’s some discussion going on as to whether it’s the USA or Canada). Seems that this particular Smart ForTwo got rear-ended by a friggin’ GMC box truck (gross weight of around 10 to 12 thousand pounds) and THEN it got creamed in an offset frontal impact by a FULL SIZED GMC van (and those weigh in at, what, 5500 or 6000 pounds?).

Yes, It might be small, but it’s a small Mercedes Benz, and those guys know how to build them tough.

I know form personal experience. I used to own an 84 300 turbo diesel. We called it The Bismarck because, “it’ll take a lucky shot from the Royal Navy to stop this thing.” Seems like that can be applied here as well. Yes, I know. Physics, size, crush-space, mass, momentum, etc.. But small and light doesn’t mean “unsafe”; it just means that safety is more of an engineering challenge.