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When I needed a car in the spring four years ago, I did some serious shopping. I drove several different models. One of the cars I was interested in was the Smart Car, made by a division of Mercedes. It's very small, which I like, and it's very fuel efficient, which I like. It's also cute and fairly unqiue, which I think is cool as well. So I considered it very carefully when I was car shopping that year.
I thought it was quite comfortable. The handling is really good. However, in the one mile test drive in Knoxville when I tested one, I definitely notice the transmission didn't shift like I would have thought it should. That and the fact that it's a rear wheel drive car kept me from seriously considering buying one at the time.
I've spent a lot of time since then contemplating that decision. Was the transmission really that bad, or was I just being over-sensitive? Judging by other poeple's comments, Top Gear for instance, and a lot of videos on Youtube, I'm not alone in this. That's the one complaint about the car (the transmission). On the other hand, lots of people complain about driving original VWs and I like mine fine.
The real question here is: would I like it as a road car? That's the one over-riding requirement for any car for me, is it reasonable to take on a long road trip? You can't really figure that out unless you can do serious driving, but finding one to rent is tough. Avis car rental claims in various places on their web site that they rent them, but I've called them several times and asked for ANY Avis office that rents the Smart, and I've come up with zero.
However, there's another interesting avenue. There's a company called
car2go that provides short-term
micro-rentals in urban areas, and the car they rent is exclusively the
Smart ForTwo. Certain cities have fleets of these Smart cars and
they just sit around the city to be rented. You buy a membership with
the company, and they issue you a proximity card membership card:
You then use the card to rent any available car2go Smart car on the
spot. You're charged for the amount of time you use the car, at a
per-minute rate until you hit the amount for one hour. After an hour,
you accumulate minutes again and so on. There's also a cap for the
amount you pay per day. The daily cap is higher than a typical small
car rental would be for a day, so it's mostly geared to using the car
for an hour or two.
They're only available in select cities in North America at the moment, but they're adding more cities. I don't happen to live near any of them, but I travel a lot. After a few years of hemming and hawing about the Smart, I had my chance in 2012. I'd found out about Smart, and I was going to be in the Austin area in the fall, which is a city that has car2go cars. I got the car2go membership and brought the card along. Unfortunately, I'd already bought my airline tickets when I had this idea, so I ended up with not a lot of time to do any driving. I probably got 20 minutes driving total, and it was in a pretty heavy rain, so I didn't really get a feel for it (although it handled very very well in the rain).
This spring (2013) I ended up with work travel that I arranged to go through Austing to visit family and it ended at Portland (another city served by car2go) so I was able to plan my travel to heavily use car2go to try it out and to get some serious Smart car driving time.
To start out with, car2go had JUST installed a group of their cars at
the "The Parking Spot" facility at the Austin airport, so there are
always car2go cars there that you can grab at the airport and drive
into the city if you're arriving:
Each car has a proximity card reader inside the windshield on the
driver's side that also has an LCD status display that tells you if
the car is in an active rental and if not, if it's available to rent:
So you hold your card up to the reader, then it checks your account,
activates your rental, and unlocks the driver's door:
Inside the car, there's a center console nav unit that's also a part
of the security system on the car. The ignition key is in a socket in
that console.
When you get into the car, you type your PIN into the
console, then the rental is active and you can take the key.
The key cylinder is right behind the gear shift between the seats.
The Smart ForTwo is just two seats, of course, and a bit of luggage
space behind the seats over the engine. It's actually a reasonable
amount of room. It fit my big week-trip travelling suitcase just
fine:
and in fact it JUST fits lying down if you move the seats out of the
fully-rearward position:
And a few dashboard shots because they amuse me:
In the 2012 trip, I only drove the Smart twice on two very short stints, and it was all in heavy rain. This trip in 2013, I had 5 rull runs in Smart cars. In Austin, I drove to meet family, then back to the airport. In Portland I stopped by local community college that has a bunch of Smart cars on their campus (which is a great idea, I think) so that I could drive one on the Interstate. And then travelling through Austin in my way back, I took a Smart to my hotel and then back to the airport to fly home.
So after all that driving, here are my impressions. The good things are what I thought they were. It's a fine car to ride around in. The handling, suspension, brakes are good. The seats and interior are comfortable. I like the instruments and the panel layout.
And finally, the transmission. As others have found, if you shift manually it's better. The only real annoyance is the shift from 1st to 2nd gear. If you get the rhythm right and shift manually, it's not too bad. So I wish that mercedes would just bloody well make a transmission that was better, but I would find it a mild annoyance but perfectly drivable.