Ask Rumblenote: Is Smart Car Dumb?

"So what's so smart about the Smart car," a reader in Germantown, Maryland, writes. "If I'm going to be riding around in a shoebox and threatened all around me by tanks, I at least want to get huge gas mileage for my trouble."
Germantown has a point. The Smart (the 2009 with the Mitsubishi badge) gets 33 in the city and 41 on the highway, about the same as the reader's five-year-old Scion XA.
But the Smart sure looks like it gets good mileage doesn't it? We're guessing the tiny car's appeal resides in its iconic look. There isn't anything else like it on the road, which is a plus. But we do think dropping $17,000 on a Smart is kind of foolish, unless you're really bad at parallel parking. It' s not the size that drive us away. If we're buying a two-seater, it better do zero to 60 in at least half the Smart's 12 seconds.