London, England – It’s not often that I use the side of traffic officers in a dispute over parking. But there’s a first time for everything – and today I propose we all raise our glasses to whoever decided to slap a yellow ticket on the white Smart car of Gloucestershire businesswoman Vanessa Price.
Price recently won a court action against her council in Stroud. It has withdrawn the £50 (R900) ticket she was given last year for parking her Smart car at a right angle on the kerb so that it jutted out into the road.
A parking penalty tribunal ruled in her own favour, finding that she had not breached any traffic regulation order by leaving her car as she did – as you don’t have to park within the lines of limited waiting spaces (where you can park free for a short period of time) on the streets.
“I aimed to reason using the officer but he was having none of it,” said Price, recalling the incident. “A lot of people were coming out of the shops and taking photos and saying how wrong it was.”
But, having studied the photo showing her parking habits, I somehow doubt it was the traffic warden these onlookers thought is at the wrong. Just have a look yourself.
First, mrs Price’s car is quite clearly about 20cm over the dotted white lines which mark the designated parking bay. Second, it’s parked in ways that appears to make it almost impossible for the cars either sides of it to have out without denting her shiny white Noddymobile.
PREJUDICED
All right. I admit it, I’m prejudiced. I hate Smart cars. I’ve loathed them since that time I glimpsed the first ones, crawling over the streets of London – from to 100 within half an hour – some time inside the mid Noughties.
The Smart was the brainchild of Nicolas Hayek, the man who invented Swatch watches. His idea was for a small, fuel-efficient, eco-friendly car that will be easy to park in small, city spaces.
The Swatch company started working with car giant Daimler-Benz in 1995 and the first Smart was shown at the Frankfurt motor show in 1997.
The car’s maker boasts that its vehicles – from exterior to seats, the battery – are 98 percent recyclable, and each car is classified as an Ultra Low Emission Vehicle. They run on regular diesel or petrol, however are considered eco-friendly because they use less than four litres per 100km along with their carbon emissions are low.
The facts, though, is the fact that Smart masquerades as something modest, practical, simple and back-to-basics when, in fact, it’s just a poseur’s gimmick.
Driving a Smart will be the modern version of those horrid old back window stickers that employed to say: “My other car is a Porsche.” Except the difference is when you have a Smart, your other car probably is a Porsche.
Check out the price list and you’ll see what I mean. This stuff aren’t manufactured for peanuts by some charming little yogurt-weaving collective in Wales. They’re created in Germany by Daimler, with pricing to match.
Even the standard, two-door model won’t leave you with much change out of R200 000.
MOTORISED SKATEBOARD
This, I concede, would be very good value for the real car. But we’re not really talking about real cars here, are we?
We’re talking some thing akin to a jumped-up fairground bumper car. Or maybe a two-seat motorised skateboard with a roof on it. The one that can’t travel very far without a refill – hence the need for that Porsche (or whatever) for people awkward, longer journeys which aren’t simply about popping out from your town house to stock up on caviar.
But this isn’t about inverted snobbery or class war, I promise. I’m all for rich people spending lots of money on luxury goods to boost the economy.
They’re neither a deliciously self-indulgent luxury nor a sincere, horny-handed necessity,. That’s the things i resent about Smarts. Rather, they’re the embodiment of one of the grisliest new trends in this hideously shallow modern age of ours: the ecological boast.
Ecological boast goods are items you buy not because you truly desire them or you need them, but rather simply because they show the globe how caring you are.
There are quite a few cars that fit into this category: If it weren’t for purpose of moral grandstanding because it’s so horribly uncomfortable and tinny, the Prius, for example, which no sane person would go near.
RICH PEOPLE’S TOYS
Also in this category, of course, is any battery-powered car. These are another rich person’s toy: not least because it’s handy to get a townhouse with sufficient parking space in the front for you to be able recharge it through your window at night. It’s no coincidence that Smart is now introducing an electric range.
If we were being lectured, all in all, it is actually as: “Forget all that reactionary nonsense about striving to help make your life ever more enjoyable and comfy. Should you collide with anything larger than a bicycle you will likely be squashed flat, and, instead, strive to make yourself a better person by paying through the nose to ride in a vehicle about as spacious because the Black Hole of Calcutta and so flimsy that. In fact, it’s not about you: it’s about saving the planet! ”
Which, of course, precisely explains the insufferable arrogance of Smart owners. Regardless of the inconvenience caused with their fellow road-users, is because they genuinely believe they hold the moral high ground, the reason they believe they can park wherever they can.
There has, so far as I’m aware, been no change to the Highway Code that says: “Smart drivers are exempt from parking regulations because they use less petrol and therefore save the planet from global warming.”
But the way most of them continue, you’d never guess it, would you?
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