Homeless in Vancouver: Media has a cow over Smart Car tipping

A person might feel nervous right now if they lived in San Francisco and owned a Smart Car.

In the early morning of April 7, three or four Smart Cars in San Francisco were either tipped, flipped, or upended. A witness to one of the tippings reportedly told police it took six to eight people to lift the little 740-kilogram vehicle onto its rear end.

This so-called spree of Smart Car tipping in the California Bay hardly rates as either a fad or a crime wave, yet it is attracting an incredible amount of international media attention.

Yet another amazing thing you can do with a Smart Car

The sight of a Smart Car upended like a…toy is certainly visually arresting and it plays well to the car’s strengths (making it look even more parkable and cute) and it also plays well with the haters.

Online reports of the San Francisco tippings have attracted a significant number of snarky comments to the effect that it serves Smart Car owners right for buying such toys.

Smart Cars seem to have the same kind of polarizing hot-button hipness and ability to attract strong reader reaction that Apple products have.

A Smart Fourtwo even looks like the kind of automobile Apple might design. It’s very reminiscent of the iWare responsible for Apple’s early 21st-century resurgence: the adorable looking iMacs and the infuriatingly hip iPods.

A five-year-old Facebook page devoted to Smart Car tipping features a silhouette image of three monkeys gathered around a Smart Car flipped over onto its roof against a cyan blue background. This delibarately apes the signature style of the original iPod ads which ran from 2000 to 2011.

“Give me a place to stand and with a drink I will move the world”

The tippings themselves probably have more to do with alcohol than any kind of jealousy, envy, or misguided hatred.

I imagine that other big cities are more like Vancouver than not: they have streets and corners, and on those corners they have mailboxes and newspaper boxes and on the weekends they have young lads and lasses out for a drink, some of whom end up entertaining themselves by knocking over mailboxes and newspaper boxes. And why? Because they’re drunk and they can.

Young weekend drinkers have been tipping the same two kinds of street furniture for as long as I can remember. But then, until recently they haven’t had Smart Cars to kick around.

When you give it some sober second thought, a Smart Car is a very inviting target for tipping. Combined with its small cartoon car size is the fact that it’s so squared off on the sides, back, and top.

And when you throw in a six-pack of beer—it’s just so do-able, dude!

Brief history of a non-epidemic

The earliest report of Smart Car tipping comes from 2005 when a Canadian owner posted details in an online forum about his “smarty” being tipped over. There was a $1,000 reward for the culprits.

Four years later in 2009, an Edmonton, Alberta man was charged with mischief after he tipping a Smart Car in the plain view of a crowd. The onlookers, however, didn’t just stand by idly and watch; they also snapped photos.

That same year vandals in Amsterdam, Holland, were actually pushing Smart Cars into the canals. Police admitted to at least two cases but said they were reluctant for publicity for fear of encouraging copycats. In both cases the cars were described as write-offs.

The feat was made easier by the fact the little cars were parked with either their front or back ends pointed towards the water. Even though most canals were protected by a low guard rail, one Amsterdam report explained, the Smart Cars were small enough to be lifted and tossed.

Prior to last week’s handful of tippings in the Bay area, the most publicized dislocation of a Smart Car happened right here in Vancouver during the 2011 hockey riot—it even made it onto YouTube.

A search on YouTube of “smart car tipping” yields no fewer than 2,069 videos involving Smart Car tipping—and one video of a Smart Car un-tipping.