Review: Smart Fortwo Passion Cabriolet

A preface about myself. I really love automobiles. Somewhere in my bloodstream might be a little 93 octane swirled around with the hemoglobin. The downfall to this is that it does have a Pollyanna effect on my stance with vehicles—I always can find the good in them. Especially when it comes to my specialty and deep passion—vehicle technology. Vehicle technology coupled with environmentally friendly design and fuel consumption is especially appealing to me. Mega SUV or small runabout, every vehicle has a purpose in the vehicle landscape and a designer behind it who brought some features to the limelight. The smart fortwo Passion Cabriolet is an interesting vehicle. It was designed in Europe as a city car—a runabout designed to squeeze into the tightest parking spots and drink the minimum amount of gas. Its design was assisted by Swiss watchmaker Swatch to add trendiness and then brought to life by engineers at Mercedes. Moreover, it was designed to be cuter than a boxful of puppy pugs. Hell, one even sits on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (but to be honest I do not “get” a lot of things on display at MoMA). By the time you read this, The smart should be arriving at Penske-affiliated auto dealerships in large cities. As much as I can try to pile the praise on this vehicle, I just don’t get it. It certainly isn’t for me, and again, I appreciate all automobiles.

My smart experience started in the mean streets of Manhattan where one of the first vehicles in the United States was available for demonstration purposes. My wife was with me to pick up the vehicle and upon first sight exclaimed “Omigod! Is this really safe?” I spent the previous night cruising YouTube and watching the dwarfed automobile hit a concrete wall at 80 MPH and then deflect itself off of a Mercedes E-Class with minimal damage to the crash test dummies. “Absolutely, let’s go!” I told my wife.

The first problems started when the parking garage attendant could not get the car started. I got in and had a look. No fault of the battery or the electronics systems, just the odd gearshift that needs to be put in the ‘reverse’ direction to fire up the soda-bottle-sized 1.0 liter 3-cylinder engine. We charged up the parking garage ramp but needed to insert a keycard into a slot to allow the automatic gate to open. No problem, I’ll just throw the car in park while I fish around for the keycard… Oh wait, there is no “park” on the gearshift. I pulled up the emergency brake with the car still in drive, found the card, and then off we went. (Smart officials say there will be some changes to the awkward gear level on the production version to make it more friendly to North American motorists accustomed to seeing “Park, Neutral, and Reverse” on their gearshift selectors.) More on the gearshift and the transmission later.

Driving the smart fortwo in traffic before its official release is the automobile equivalent of me wearing a pink tutu in public. Everyone stares. Most of the inter-vehicle paparazzi consists of small children who think you are driving a toy to burly workers in large trucks asking how much it costs. It did not help that the press sample was nuclear-reactor-warning orange and silver.

The concept of smart is to have a runabout that is ideal for the city, and in that respect, lets look at the pluses. If you had any agenda about passing the parallel parking segment of your road test, you will love the smart. At 8.8 feet long, you do not fully appreciate how small it is until you see it. The size still sounds like a foot taller than Yao Ming, so it must be larger than you imagine. But it isn’t. In fact, the WIDTH of a Hummer H1 is 7.2 feet. In other words, you can nose this little guy in between two parallel-parked cars, headlights to the curb! Just be careful that they don’t get too close or else you will not be able to open the door of your car to get out. In parking ability, the smart rules!

The other cool feature is the convertible top. You can make it a large sunroof by just hitting a button, and then when you are stopped there are two removable pillars that fit in the trunk (if you can call it that) to have a total open-air experience. There is a lot of other niceties on board the Passion, including heated seats and a Grundig radio that has an iPod input in the glovebox. The audio quality is what you would expect for two speakers in the door (adequate).

Unfortunately, the smart fortwo is plagued with a poorly designed transmission and gearshift selector. It is an automated manual five-speed transmission which the driver operates by briefly tapping the shift lever on the center console, so there is no clutch pedal. When briefly pushed forward, the transmission shifts to the next highest gear. Backwards gives you a downshift. To access the fully automatic mode—the way most cars with automated-manual transmissions start off—you need to click a small button on the gearshift lever and an “A” illuminates in the LCD instrument cluster. The transmission hunts for gears worse than Elmer Fudd trapping an evasive Bugs Bunny. Moreover, the shifts are excruciatingly late. If you tap the lever, it takes a second for the transmission to recognize the command and finally react. Moreover, once the shift occurs, it bucks your head against the backrest as the engine connects to the wheels. It was the worst ‘shift shock’ I ever felt and it will probably leave most drivers longing for a vehicle with a good ol’-fashioned automatic transmission if used for the daily grind. The only plus: smart says your payoff for the punishment is fuel economy in the 40 MPG range. Indeed, my tester was filled up from half a tank for $8.73, with gas near $3 a gallon at the time.

Smart as a company prides itself on environmental activism. I am all for the environment and saving money on gas. But I have also reviewed winners such as the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid. They have fuel economy coupled with a good amount of cargo space and ride comfort. When you ultimately look at the technology and practicality of these two over-achievers, the smart looks like the short car that rode the short bus to school. If you are a city dweller looking to hop into the tightest parking spaces while barely sipping gas, the smart may be right for you. But for me, I will take a stroll over to a Vespa or Honda scooter store and get the ultimate gas-sipping diminutive urban vehicle.