Smarts aren't actually that efficient. The small body means that the car has to be very strong, and therefore very heavy in order to withstand collisions. I was looking at a Smart on display, and I was surprised to see that it got poorer mileage than my Hyundai Elantra, despite the fact that my Elantra is about twice as large.
My wife and I were curious about the Smart until we drove one - it seems to pause for about a second while the transmission changes gears. It was such an absurd lurch that I felt a little bit worried about being on the road, even within my own neighborhood. Given that, and the unimpressive mileage, the prime advantage to driving a Smart car is that you have many more parking options, which can be really nice when you're in a city.
Having said all that, I get what this guy's saying in a way. We recently bought a Dodge Magnum (For a roadtrip across the US next year). All my life I've driven compact cars. The Elantra always seemed like plenty of car to me. I could sit four comfortably (five less so), I can fit a drum kit, a guitar amp and cab, and still have someone in the passenger seat, and it was still larger on the inside than a Civic or a Jetta.
After driving the Magnum for a month or two, I had to switch it up and drive the Elantra, and I was struck by how claustrophobic the car felt. It never seemed like a compact car to me, but after driving around in a car whose title is Latin for "big", the Elantra definitely felt compact now. My idea of what 'normal' was very definitely shifted. (It's still a great car, ten years on.)
Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.
Granted, with vague language like that, its hard to perceive exactly what the author is arguing. His use of the word "obesity", however, implies heaviness as well as bigness. I was pointing out that the Smart is probably nearly as heavy as my Elantra, despite being smaller.
In fact, from a strict efficiency perspective, an Elantra is much more efficient than a Smart. For the same mileage, you gain the ability to carry a substantial amount of extra passengers and cargo. The increased size of the Elantra is quite useful, and goes directly against the inefficiency argument the author makes.
I find it far more likely that the extra strength was required for the impact collisions. The other cars on the road in the US are just far larger and massive than those elsewhere, so a stronger heavier car is needed to stay safe.
It creates a bit of a Catch 22 when trying to bring down the average size / weight of a vehicle.
Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in TransLoc? Is it like röck döts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots)?
Apple products excluded, presumably...
I don't know the company, but that's my assumption for the logo.
The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the Mississippi.
You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.
And I have more than one bathroom even though it's really rare that more than one person has to use the bathroom at the same time.
I have a mountain bike that I only occasionally take up a mountain.
My car can brake in a ridiculously short distance, even though I've only used that feature to save my life once.
I wear a seatbelt all the time, even though I've never been in an accident where it would have made a difference.
Edge cases matter. A lot. The Smart car covers the "every possible travel condition that a college student can think of" case very well, but it's not versatile enough for most people.
But, I lived in Germany for 5 months and only rode in a car 2 or 3 times, and Germany doesn't even have the best public transportation in the world.
Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.
If you want to spend money on stuff that is marketed to a self proclaimed "smart" niche audience of people who think that buying cute stuff makes them better or "smarter" for their purchased possessions, fine, do so, but don't expect the public to be enthused about your overconfidence in how much better material things make you and your life.
P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop behind you "too late" at a major intersection.
Maybe that means we need to question that large SUV with a single occupant and an always empty cargo hold. Or perhaps why as a society we do not find it acceptable to "risk our lives" in small, light cars yet we find it perfectly ok to "risk the lives of others" in our large, heavy "car-trucks."
http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Smart_ForTw...
Think about it, how much of your everyday needs around within 5 miles of you? Unless you live in a rural area, I'd suspect 100% of your needs are within 5 miles of you. At that speed, you could get to anywhere in ~15 minutes inside of that 5 mile radius.
I do try to cruise under the speeds where aerodynamic drag outweighs other factors, when I can. I wish the aftermarket for aerodynamic improvements to passenger vehicles were much larger (as in, existed at all--cosmetic facades that slightly increase downforce are about all you can buy).
Natural gas is overwhelmingly used for the production of ammonia..." — Wikipedia
So, sure, we use energy to create fertilizer. Instead of mining it and shipping it, or going without. Again, if it wasn't the cheaper alternative we wouldn't be doing it.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twingo
Doubt you can get it in the US though.
>The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.
This has more to do with humanity's insistence on living in places which cannot reasonably produce enough food to sustain the local population. The Phoenix metropolitan area, located in an Arizona desert, holds over 4 million people; Moscow, just shy of the Arctic Circle, is home to 11 million.
There was also a major heat wave in Moscow last summer. See e.g. "Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow" (http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-deat...).
You're quite correct (these scaled-out world maps can be misleading), though it is not really situated on fertile ground either. A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for agriculture!
