Smart Fortwo Vs. 900-Pound Bull Elk: Who Wins? Do Both Lose?

Elk. Majestic creatures, and delicious, too. You can cut that meat with a fork. But colliding with 900 pounds of it in the smallest car on North American roads is no one’s idea of a picnic.

That’s exactly what happened last week, when a tiny, first-generation Smart Fortwo went head-to-head with a bull elk on a dark British Columbia highway.

The crash happened outside of Comox, on B.C.’s Vancouver Island — an equally majestic land populated with mountains, abundant wildlife, ex-hippies, and perhaps, Sasquatch. Chris Markevich was behind the wheel of the Smart, and had momentarily turned off his high beams.

“I almost passed far enough where I could turn my high beams back on, and as I was going to turn them back on, it was elk – boom,” Markevich told CTV News.

After the impact, his car rolled four or five times in the grassy median, coming to rest upright. The Smart’s front end was destroyed and its windshield completely shattered. The elk exited the scene playing a harp. With both Smart and elk terminated, Markevich walked away with some minor scratches and seatbelt bruising.

Smart touted its “safety cage” technology when the diminutive vehicles dieseled onto the market a decade ago, and it’s those strong windshield pillars that Markevich can thank for avoiding a meal he couldn’t survive. Elk and moose are terrible things to encounter at highway speeds. A passenger car’s low front end will usually take out the animal’s legs, with the body impacting the windshield. The results aren’t pretty.

In this case, the vehicle’s small size and blunt front end, as well as the elk’s massive girth (it was winched onto a five-ton flatbed for removal) conspired to save the driver’s life.

“Because it doesn’t have a protruding bumper,” Markevich said, “the paramedics, police officer, and nurses and doctors at the hospital all told me if it were any other car, it would likely have hit it at the knees, and propelled it head-first into the windshield, impaling me.”

When your car saves your from impalement-by-animal, newfound affection for it is understandable. Marvevich said he plans to replace his totaled Smart with a new one, which is good news for the company whose Canadian sales numbers were in the three-figure range last year.

[Image: Oregon Department of Agriculture/ Flickr]