Tiny Wheels.(The Talk of the Town)(DaimlerChrysler Smart Fortwo)(Product/service evaluation)

A classic problem in Euclidean geometry--how to fit more cars into Manhattan--has been solved. The two-passenger Smart Fortwo, which is manufactured by DaimlerChrysler, is only a hundred and six inches long, or nearly three and a half feet shorter than a Mini Cooper (and just six feet longer than a Cozy Coupe, the orange-and-yellow plastic toddler-powered vehicle sold by Little Tikes). That means that you can easily parallel-park two Fortwos in any curb space that's long enough to fit a single Lincoln Navigator L--or perpendicular-park three of them, since the Fortwo is less than a third as wide as the Navigator is long, and is so short that it doesn't stick out into traffic when docked nose in.

A Smart Fortwo visited the city recently, accompanied by David Schembri, who is the president of Smart USA. (The car has been sold in Europe for the past eight years and will go on sale in the United States in January.) As Schembri drove up Third Avenue, a passenger in a green Mercury Mountaineer with suitcases bungee-corded to the roof made the international roll-down-your-window signal, then hollered, "I saw you on 'Good Morning America'!" and gave Schembri a thumbs-up.

Schembri darted into a side street-- "A three-lane cross is no problem"--and pulled up next to a Toyota Matrix, which had stopped at a light, in order to prove that the Matrix was practically S.U.V.-size by comparison. A cop, apparently objecting to the fact that Schembri had driven into the opposing traffic lane in order to do this, stopped his own car alongside the Fortwo and gave Schembri a meaningful look. Schembri shouted, "Hey, we're just test-driving it! It would make a good police car--you'd get to know your prisoner real well!" The cop smiled and drove away.

A little later, Schembri perpendicular-parked in a seemingly too-teensy gap between two police cars parallel-parked on the east side of Third Avenue between Twentieth and Twenty-first ...