COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

Is your car smart? Mine is, sort of.

There is a car that is very smart, however. It’s so smart it’s called the Smart car — and you have to be a very smart little car before they call you that.

You’ve probably seen a picture of one, if not the real thing. To say the Smart car is small is an understatement. Teeny-tiny is more like it, sort of like a large egg on wheels.

It fits two people, with more room than you’d think, but there is definitely nothing racy going on in the back seat, mostly because there isn’t one.

Actually, you should just call it a Smart, which is the name of the company that makes it. The petite little bubble buggy was invented in 1994 by Nicolas Hayek, the founder of Swatch watches, who sold the company to Mercedes-Benz in 2006.

The Smart car took Europe by storm. It’s environmentally friendly, greener than Killarney, sips its gas, never slurps. I’ve been fascinated with the Smart from the first moment I saw it, which was in Milano in 2001.

What amazed me was how many of them could be parked side by side. That’s because it’s less than 9 feet long — the width of one traffic lane — so there’s no need to parallel-park.

When you get to where you’re going, you just turn in or back right up to the curb, which means you can stuff three Smarts into the same space one conventional car would use.

But I’ve never actually known anyone who has, had or is thinking of getting a Smart car — until last week that is, when I had an appointment with one of my doctors.

That’s “one” because I have a team of them, which is what happens when things stop working and parts start flying off every other week.

Dale Di Stefano is a Newport Beach neurologist who is not only a darn fine doctor but very funny, which is the No. 1 thing I ask of people, licensed or not.

I started going to him about five years ago when a routine check-up revealed I have something called NMBA — “No Measurable Brain Activity” — a problem that affects 6% of the general population and 74% of politicians.

Last week, while he was giving me a series of electric shocks to see if anything registered, he told me he had ordered a Smart, which I told him I needed to know everything about as soon as he was done making my hair stand up.

While I saw my first Smart in Italy, Dale saw his on Balboa Island, which is closer, but he was just as intrigued.

Since then, Dale has been thinking it’s time to go green, reduce that carbon footprint, save the planet, et cetera.

Since he lives fairly close to his office on Old Newport Boulevard, he toyed with getting a Vespa or a Segway, but that idea received a cool reception from family and friends.

Much like me, no one has ever called Dale DiStefano “pee-wee.”

“Apparently,” DiStefano said, “the image of me on a Segway or a Vespa with my white lab coat flapping in the wind was simultaneously hilarious and scary.”

One fine day last summer, he heard Smart was taking orders for its quirky little cars on its website — for only 99 bucks! Can you beat that? I don’t see how. Neither could Dale.

When he made the big announcement that he was going Smart and small, most people said the two things every Smart buyer hears — “What’s a Smart car?” and “Omigod, you’re gonna die in that thing.”

Ironically, the Smart has not only performed very well in crash tests, but way better than much larger and heavier conventional cars. And so, in June 2007, with one click, Dale plunked down his 99 bucks and became an official, certified Smart buyer.

Well, he tried to anyway. More than a year later, it turns out the Smart car may not be so smart after all.

Apparently, it can’t figure out how to get from Europe to Newport Beach, which definitely requires a few turns, but not 14 months worth.

For a while, Dale was able to occupy himself with the very hip Smart website, where you can personally design your little smarty inside and out — colors, accessories, the whole strudel.

“It almost sounded like they were building them individually, one at a time, just like a Bentley or Bugatti,” DiStefano said, “except this was a $16,000 car.” Fourteen months and a mountain of e-mail messages later — “your Smart will ship soon; any day now; no, seriously” — what Dale has so far is a stylish and environmentally friendly virtual car.

Will Doctor D. hang in there? For the time being, yes. The thrill of being the first on the block to drive the smartest, oddest car around is fading fast as a handful of Smart cars pop up here and there and there. But he’d still like to give it whirl. Stay tuned.

And there you have it — Smart cars, not so smart cars, strudel and Bugattis. No one ever said saving the planet would be easy. Just picking out the colors can take forever.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at [email protected].