Smart pulls off an Olympic feat

 

I'm not gonna say that Lorraine Sommerfeld and Wheels editor Mark Richardson stole the good bits of the Smart Winter Expedition, having driven Legs 1 and 2, respectively.

But my story on Leg 3 could be as short as:

"We drove the Smart cars from Whitehorse to Vancouver.

"Nobody crashed.

"The cars got very dirty.

"The End."

And toss in a dozen photos.

The fact is, once you're south of Fort Nelson, B.C., the feel of the drive wasn't that much different from driving, say, North Bay to Toronto.

Oh sure:

I discovered there are two Starbucks in Whitehorse; from there it is a long, long way to Fort St. John.

We got occasional glimpses of the Rocky Mountains.

I have seen moose and caribou at the side of roads before; this was the first time I ever saw buffalo. Wood bison, to be precise. A sign at one of our hostelries said there were about 250 wood bison left in this corridor. If you've seen one wood bison, apparently you've seen them all because I am certain we saw at least 250 of them.

The Alaska Highway, built from Dawson Creek, B.C., (at the time, the railhead from the east and the "highway-head" from the south) to Delta Junction, Ala., during World War II to provide a land link to Alaska should the Japanese invade that then-territory, all in a remarkable eight months (no environmental assessment reports required back then) is still a challenging route. It is now entirely paved, although winter maintenance consists largely of getting the big drifts out of the way and sanding the hills and corners.

The Sign Post Forest at Watson Lake, Yukon Territory, is amazing. During construction of the Alaska Highway, a U.S. Army engineer named Carl Lindley was erecting road signs in the area. Perhaps feeling homesick, he put one up pointing to his hometown: "Danville, Ill., 2,835 miles." Others who followed joined in the fun. Now more than 65,000 signs are here from all over the world, including one for the Toronto Star, to the detriment I'm sure of municipal budgets everywhere.

The Coquihalla highway from Merritt to Hope is somewhat more scenic than the Hwy. 11/400 from Orillia to the GTA.

We enjoyed a magical sunset coming out of Fort St. John, heading to Williams Lake.

The hot springs near Liard (no, not as in a Scottish nobleman), in B.C. but just a nine-iron shot inside the border with the Yukon Territory, were pretty, um, cool – cool enough to give myself a frozen Mohawk. I must say, however, that my idea of "change rooms" does include, well, doors? Windows? Something other than wooden walls, a concrete floor and no light or heat whatsoever?

Changing out of skivvies into a bathing suit, barefooting it across said concrete floor and about a 10-metre-wide boardwalk covered in about 10 cm of snow to get to the steamy-hot water wasn't nearly as much fun as I am making it sound here. I was too cold to even think about the fact that it was going to be a lot worse getting out, soaking wet.

And it was.

Still, it was by far the most memorable moment of our leg.

Not enough, however, to inspire the poetry of our Esteemed Editor (see his installment from Feb. 13).

Rather, I'll focus on the car.

Would the Smart Fortwo be my first choice to drive to the Arctic circle? Not even close.

Did it do the job? Yes.

It reminded me of the justification mountain climbers give for their particular madness: "Because it's there."

We drove the cars on this trek – because we could.

Mercedes-Benz had actually planned something along these lines when the car first arrived in Canada six years ago; vastly higher sales than expected prevented it at that time (they couldn't spare the cars!).

The point the company was trying to make with this adventure was that the Smart isn't simply an urban car, but that you can do just about anything you could do in any other car.

Okay, well, probably not that, unless you perform with Cirque du Soleil.

But Mercedes-Benz wanted to prove the Smart is safe; that it can be driven on the highway; that it can handle long distances; that it is good in winter; and that it can do it all with less impact on the environment than anything else on the road.

Not sure our mileage calculations were precise enough to be definitive, but we used around 6.0 litres per 100 km (47 mpg), not bad at all for cold-weather driving.

So, mission accomplished.

Mercedes-Benz Canada had made a business case for the Smart based on yearly sales of around 600 vehicles per year. Company president Marcus Breitschwerdt noted during his introductory remarks for our drive that yours truly said at the time that their estimate was low by a factor of four. Call me Nostradamus if you must: Smart has averaged about 2,500 units annually.

What has surprised everybody is that the expected 70/30 split between the three major markets (Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal) and RoC (Rest of Canada) has been almost exactly reversed. Smaller towns have been far more receptive to the car than anyone expected.

Fort Nelson, B.C., even has one, owned by 80-odd-year-old Marl Brown, curator of a local museum – and an Olympic torch bearer.

Many of the aspects of the Smart's versatility have already been vividly described by Sommerfeld and Richardson.

Allow me to recapitulate.

Given that the average car contains something like 1.2 people on any given trip, the Smart is big enough for the vast majority of trips you'd make in any car.

And obviously, it would do those trips far more fuel efficiently than just about any other car.

Towing a trailer? Moving your kid back to college? Taking the in-laws with you on your summer vacation?

Look elsewhere. Fair enough. No car can be all things to all people.

As evidenced by my early belief that Smart would do better in Canada than even Mercedes-Benz thought, it surprises me not at all that my colleagues found the interior room more than adequate.

A bit narrow, true. You get used to elbow bumps soon enough.

Likewise performance, ride and handling.

The seats are particularly comfortable and supportive, even after 700-km driving days.

Among the things that surprised even me were how quickly the car warmed up, even on -20C mornings. My driving teammate Jeremy Sinek shares my massive distaste for idling cold engines, so while the support crew would have the other cars running for 20 minutes before we spoiled scribes emerged from breakfast each morning, we had asked that ours be left alone.

It never failed to start instantly; within a very few minutes, the defroster had cleared the windshield, and the interior was pleasantly warm (we were happy to have the heated seats).

An advantage here is that there isn't much cubic volume inside the car which needs warming up.

One oddity: it seemed no matter which of us was driving, the left side window was more likely to fog up than the right.

Any clues out there?

One problem we did encounter was the rear window defroster/wiper/washer unit could not keep up with the dirt and ice.

Then again, the big Mercedes-Benz GL SUV support vehicles didn't fare much better.

The dirt kicked up on these highways is particularly nasty. Not just dirty, but oily, presumably from deposits laid down by the trucks.

A couple of Smarts kept running out of washer fluid, largely (as Richardson noted) because they followed their colleagues too closely.

Refilling is difficult because you have to remove the front hood by pulling on two clips, which tend to get frozen with snow build-up.

We learned early on to run seventh out of seven, leaving a big gap to car six.

Both Sommerfeld and Richardson made reference to the huge trucks that would whiz by at warp speed in the opposite direction on these highways.

What amazed us was how little the Smart was affected by the big trucks' bow waves.

You'd have expected it to be blown about like a ping-pong ball in a lottery machine, but it stayed well-planted.

And trucks are the order of the day up there. We were a day and a half into Leg 3 before we saw our first car, and oddly, it was also a three-cylinder – an old Suzuki Swift.

Everything else was a truck: a transport, a full-size pickup, or something in between.

Sinek noted that the Smart seemed almost happier at 120 km/h than at 80, perhaps due to its German autobahn-influenced roots.

There is little doubt that you can buy "more car" for the $14,000 to $25,000 that a Smart Fortwo will cost you.

Okay, maybe not a cute little convertible like the Smart Cabrio (our cars were the more robust – and warmer – coupes).

But everything from a Chevrolet Aveo to a Hyundai Accent to a Kia Rio to a Nissan Versa to a Suzuki Swift+ to a Toyota Echo will give you almost the same fuel efficiency of a Smart – and a backseat in the bargain.

Would you be any more likely to take one of those to the Arctic?

Probably not.

And if you did, would anybody notice?

Probably not.

Sign me up for the next trip.

Travel was provided to freelance auto journalist Jim Kenzie by the car maker.jim@jimkenzie.com

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