The Triple Bottom Line Blog

Main reason for the sparse blogging recently is that my wife and I have been traveling in Italy and suffering from a full-blown case of Stendahl Syndrome, the condition of psychological and emotional overload caused by exposure to too much beauty in too short a time.

Italy is especially dangerous for people who still remember the slides of Renaissance painting and sculpture they saw in their college History of Art course, since half of the drop-dead-gorgeous images from Janson are likely to be encountered in any whirlwind tour of Rome, Florence, and Venice, inducing the art-lover's equivalent of diabetic sugar shock.

Now that we are home, we are in recovery and beginning to sort out our impressions of the trip. Among other things it was fascinating to observe the environmental attitudes and behaviors of the Italians and compare them to those prevalent among Americans.

Italy is of course a haven for small cars adapted to narrow city streets and scarce parking, from little Fiats and Peugeots to the even tinier Smart car. This is a Daimler-Chrysler product that interestingly enough was originally created by Nicholas Hayek, the Lebanese/Swiss entrepreneur best known for developing the Swatch timepiece empire. (You can see an example on the left in the photo above.)

Equipped with a conventional (not hybrid or electrical) engine, the pint-sized Smart reportedly performs surprisingly well in safety tests, including crash tests. (Nonetheless it is not a good idea to drive a Smart car into a concrete barrier at 70 miles per hour. Click here for a fun comparative video replete with slow-motion images of crumpling metal and flying fragments of glass.) It gets better highway mileage than a Prius but does slightly less well in the city.

The Smart car is expected to be available in the USA starting early in 2008. (It has been sold in Canada since 2004 and is reportedly quite popular.) With a starting price around $12,000, it looks to us as if the Smart car occupies the same business niche once defined by the old Volkswagen Beetle--ultra-cheap, basic transportation (big enough to carry two people and a case of beer, as the saying goes), highly practical for specific applications (i.e. zipping around the city with one passenger and little cargo) while also being stylish and chic in a counter-intuitive way. It's an "environmental" choice not just in terms of fuel consumption and emissions but also in terms of reducing the vehicle footprint--the literal footprint, not the carbon footprint--in a setting where physical space is at a premium.

For my wife and me--dwellers in New York's northern suburbs who are continually depressed over being surrounded by lone drivers roaring through the village streets in giant SUVs and Hummers--the ubiquitous Smart cars bouncing over Rome's ancient cobblestones and tucking themselves neatly into almost nonexistent parking spaces were a cheery sight. Perhaps by this time next year we will begin to see whether enough Americans share our perspective to make the Smart car a viable business proposition in the US market.

In a day or two I'll post some recent news about environmental trends in the world's greatest auto-free city, the magnificent and imperiled Venice.

Labels: Climate and Carbon, Rome, Smart Car