Driving a smart car to avoid the police? real? ?

It is usually a bad idea to escape from the police. You will end up with a flat tire and your mouth full of gravel. Even in a fast car, you rarely manage to escape. In a slow car, you are done. Seriously, why bother. The driver tried to escape the police by driving a Smart Fortwo Cabriolet, which proved this. This is the slowest chase since O.J., this man "escaped" the highway at a top speed of 90 mph. Note that he is overtaking other vehicles, but the speed is not faster than normally expected on the main road. With the end of the chase, a pickup truck passed by the Smart car.

I realize the guy was exiting the highway at that point but it is hilarious that he is getting passed in a chase at all. Come on, not only is this guy running from the cops in a Smart Fortwo but it’s a convertible. This is just icing on the cake of the chase. The cops follow this guy at a fairly reasonable rate of speed back to what looks like his house where they proceed to throw him in handcuffs. This is probably the funniest thing I have seen all week. Remember kids, if you are going to run from the cops, drive something faster than a shopping cart.

For those that need a technical refresher on the performance of the little Smart Fortwo; it has a 1.0L three cylinder motor making a massive 70 hp attached to the world’s shittiest automated manual gearbox. The shifts are painfully slow making its tiny bit of performance that much worse. This is all wrapped in an 1850 lbs package. Which sounds great until you run the numbers and realize that the Smart has a worse power to weight ratio than a Prius. There are some interesting uses for Smart cars but none of them use the stock engine and its terrible transmission. Check out this video of a Smart car that has had a few “improvements.” Yes, the Smart is originally rear engine rear drive but in stock trim good luck getting it to spin the tires even in snow.

For this small device, not all hope is dashed. The new Smart Fortwo is here, and it fixes many of the defects of old cars. You will be able to get a more powerful engine, as well as a true three-pedal manual or traditional automatic (which is much better than the old junk). The appearance is more cartoonish, but in any case, what you are driving will dump 9 clowns in the circus. I look forward to giving a new test drive. My first generation Honda Insight is a bit tired.