Is That a Car or an Enormous Yet Elegant Paperweight?

Smart Car Makes First Appearance as Lifestyle Accessory That Can Be Stored in Prissily Art Directed Magazine Spread

A studiously low-tech bike, a spilled sack of organic groceries, and a Smart ForTwo Passion Cabrio, arranged with minimal comment next to a house made entirely of cardboard. Now there's some esoteric vehicular product placement, from the style tyrants over at The New York Times "T" rags. Well, we knew it was only a matter of time before the pugnaciously unprofitable Smart franchise invaded our Yank culture's upscale urban lifestyle primers. It's basically the automobile-as-timepiece-or-maybe-necktie, anyway, and at around $13,000, the ForTwo Cabrio costs less than much of the output of Switzerland's Vallée du Joux. Bonus points: as diehard followers of micro-rides will recall, Smart got its start when Daimler and Swatch put their heads together in order to give Those Who Fear Horsepower something with four wheels to put in the driveways of their Dwell houses (SMART, in fact, means Swatch-Mercedes-ART, and yes, that makes out colons feel a little funny, too).

But just so we all know how things really stand in style-land, the Smart Cabrio, already pretty rinkydink, has been cut in half in the photo, thus violating the Number One rule of automotive advertising, even of the stealth variety: Show the car! The environmentally less sinister bike is, of course, lovingly depicted in the fullness of its updated outdatedness. We can certainly see it trumping the Cabrio for street space in whatever the Smart marketers try to convince us is the American Amsterdam. Oh wait... it's...yeah...New Amsterdam.

We're expected the joint infestation to commence any day now.