Stupid or Really Stupid?

I've seen a few Smart cars around, you know the little bitty car that's supposed to save modern urban environments. From what I can see it's intended to be for Eurpoean cities and places like New York, NY (the city so nice they named it twice), where cars intrude on a city plan. I'm not so sure it belongs in a place like LA, which is built around the idea that everyone has a car anyway.
   And is it just me, or does the Smart car look really stupid?
   Maybe it's my American sensibilities, or maybe it's the fact that I'm a heterosexual man, but aesthetically that car just doesn't work. And it makes anybody driving it look like some sort of self-satisfied urban-chic whitebread jackass, the kind who wears hemp-fiber clothes and claims to be a vegetarian when he thinks other people will claim to be vegetarians, even though he just ate a bacon cheeseburger that day.
   Here's a measure of just how pretentious and self-congratulatory the whole Smart car thing is: they're starting a 'cars2go' program in Austin, TX, using Smart cars. The idea is that you can rent the car by the minute to go where you need to go, and then just leave it for the next guy. A few seconds of non-stoned thought will tell you that logistically this just doesn't work. They're always doing crap like this in Austin, it's the annoying little brother of Texas cities, a complete pain in the ass, but everybody else puts up with them because they're part of the family.
   Do you remember when they tried the 'community bicycle' program in Portland a few years back? Failed miserably. This thing is going to go over like a fart in church too. I'm going out on a limb here and make a prediction: half the Smart cars in Austin find their way to a chop shop in Mexico the first week they try this ridiculous idea.