Actually, the purchase experience of my new Smart car left me feeling anything but smart. It's more like "what kind of an idiot was I to put up with that?"
But before I get into more, let me say that the car is absolutely brilliant on several counts. It rethinks nearly everything about the small car experience... for the better. But then the marketing department completely screwed it up. Here's what happened: I've gotta say upfront that wasting many hours with a car dealer is about as interesting to me as getting all my teeth pulled. So I'm an easy mark... I want to get in and out as quickly as possible. So once my feeble attempts at negotiation revealed that the Smart dealer in Coral Gables was just taking orders at full retail price, at the worst time ever for the car industry, we had a choice to make.
We decided to buy the car... it's coolness made up for the dealership's refusal to negotiate. Fair enough... So far. But then they called in their lawyerly closing agent who introduced us to the fact that warranties cost extra. As does service. As do several other things. So the car we thought we were buying for $18,000 ended up being about $24,000 instead. I was inches away from throwing the contract back at them, but ended up negotiating (think: pain of tooth extraction) a little of their bait-and-switch money back out. So we have the car, and love it... but absolutely detest the experience of buying it. Was it the fault of the Coral Gables Smart dealer, or do their dealers everywhere treat customers this way? Anyone else have an experience with Smart?