When it comes to plunging car sales, all eyes have been on Chrysler. Car sales at the company now managed by Fiat dropped 44 percent in 2009 compared with 2008.  Smart USA doesn’t get the same attention, but its sales were just as bad. Now they’re getting worse.  The diminutive coupe, which is sold by Daimler AG, saw a 40 percent annual sales drop last year. And for the first month of 2010, sales have plunged off a cliff. The company sold just 278 Smart cars in January, down from 864 in December, and an extraordinary 84.3 percent drop from the same month one year earlier, when 1,776 Smarts were sold.  Company officials, not surprisingly, say they know what they need to do to get back on track. That includes new marketing strategies from its new president, Jill Lajdziak, a former Saturn executive. In addition, the company will go back to road shows, taking the vehicle to select cities for public test drives to counter what a company spokesman sees as a “lack of brand awareness and misconceptions regarding its safety.”  A plug-in electric Smart will also arrive in the fourth quarter, but the number available — just 250 in select markets — will not make any dent in sales in the short run.  One thing the company won’t do is change its product mix. It will not import its diesel version available in Europe. Despite the fact that this model achieves more than 69 miles per gallon, it’s gasoline-only for these shores. Which means the company must rely on a model that has been criticized (by me and other reviewers) for a balky transmission, lackluster road-holding and pretty average fuel economy for a car this size (36 miles per gallon, according to government testing — a number I never achieved).  With larger modestly priced cars boasting similar fuel economy, like Honda’s Fit and the coming Ford Fiesta, it’s hard to see how Smart will manage to attract enough buyers to make this a going concern.
Sales of the Smart Fortwo plummeted in January. Is there any way the company can crawl back up?