Smart car inventor Nicolas Hayek dies

Nicolas Hayek, the engineer and industrialist who founded the Swiss watch company Swatch and brought the world the Smart car, died on June 28 of heart failure at his office in Switzerland. He was 82.

Hayek saved the Swiss watch industry from lower-priced Asian competition in the early 1980s by offering colorful, inexpensive Swatch timepieces that he backed with equally colorful marketing. He wanted to do the same thing with the automobile.

The first Smart cars were to have removable body films that would allow owners to change the colors of their cars as easily as his other customers changed wristwatches. He also wanted a diesel-electric drivetrain to maximize the efficiency of the 1,800-pound car.

The original spec for the Smart was to be "big enough to hold two people and a case of beer," as he told us during an interview in his Geneva office years before the car went into production. That was when he was planning a collaboration between his engineering firm SMH and Volkswagen. The VW teaming fell through but soon after, a deal was struck with Mercedes-Benz. Hayek eventually dropped out of that partnership, too, when Mercedes did not pursue his hybrid-drivetrain concept.

The car went on sale in Europe in 1998 but took 10 years after that to reach U.S. showrooms.

We tested a Smart ForTwo soon after its debut here in the States and found that, to fully appreciate the car's value, you needed to see it not as a typical automobile but as the extremity of efficiency it was intended to be. It could fit into parking spaces half the size of normal cars, for instance, and its EPA mileage rating showed 33 mpg city and 41 mpg highway.

But if you looked at it from the point of view of a nonzealot, it was abysmal, maybe the worst thing we'd ever tested. It moved from 0 to 60 mph in 14.76 seconds, by far the slowest thing we'd ever strapped the test equipment to. The quarter-mile took 19.8 seconds at 69.7 mph. It ambled through our slalom at 38.9 mph. Compare those numbers with those of a Honda Fit, which we've found to be the most fun of the so-called B-class cars, and you see what a clunker the Smart is. The Fit, no rocket itself, did get to 60 in 9.3 seconds, did the quarter-mile in 16.92 seconds at 79.9 mph, and cruised the slalom in 44.2 mph.

Sales of the Smart car were 24,622 in 2008, its first year on sale in the United States, and 14,595 in last year's recession. So it does have a following, even in this part of the world.

Hayek told us early on that he needed to collaborate with a large carmaker to succeed. But in those collaborations he lost control of his original vision for the car. The result, as so often has to be the case, was a series of compromises necessary for safety, emissions and corporate ideas about marketability.

Nonetheless the Smart lives on along with millions of Swatches as legacies to Hayek's creativity and fearlessness in industries so often diluted by blandness.

By Mark Vaughn