Fortwo/Forfour Edmunds Inside Line - First Drive: 2008 Smart Fortwo Passion

[Merc1]

America's Smallest Car


That runty runabout from Daimler that's so good at plying the narrow, crowded streets of European cities has finally arrived in the U.S. The 2008 Smart Fortwo goes on sale in January 2008, and 30,000 prospective customers have apparently already plunked down $99 deposits to hold a place in line to buy one.

Here's our report: The Smart's chief selling point is its small size, and the Smart's biggest drawback is its small size.

We tested both aspects of the Smart Fortwo's personality. First, we drove it on the narrow, crowded streets of San Francisco. And second, we squeezed 503 pounds of driver and passenger — just 4 pounds under the car's maximum payload — into this 2008 Smart Fortwo Passion. And we lived through it.

Smart USA's target audience is the mostly whippet-thin, trendsetting crowd on both coasts. This is, after all, a city car better suited to the streets of San Francisco than a cross-country trek. But as it searches for increased sales volume, Smart's marketing team has got to be grateful that it can sell to the rotund as well.

Power Isn't a Strongpoint

The Smart is powered by a 1.0-liter inline-3 that produces 70 horsepower and 68 pound-feet of torque, more power than that VW Beetle you might remember or even the first Volkswagen Golf. It is the only engine choice in all three models of the two-passenger Fortwo — the basic Pulse, the Passion coupe and the Passion cabriolet.

While this Mitsubishi-built engine makes enough steam to carry the 1,808-pound Smart coupe down the highway at 80 mph, getting there can be downright painful, especially if there's a hill in the way. We found this out when we toured some of the tech centers of Silicon Valley, including the Computer History Museum, and then drove through San Francisco. Did you know there are hills in San Francisco? The place is practically full of them!

We're told that the U.S.-specification Fortwo gets to 60 mph in 12.8 seconds, some 0.5 second quicker than the European model. In any case, our Fortwo coupe took every bit of its allotted time and more.

Not Exactly Shift-by-Wire

If you're looking for the explanation for the Fortwo's sluggish run to 60 mph, you don't have to look much further than the drivetrain's automated five-speed manual transmission. Whether you operate it with the stick on the console or the paddles on the steering wheel or just leave it to its own devices in Drive, the Getrag-built gearbox shifts with a considerable delay between gears.

The sensation is akin to mistaking the brake pedal for the clutch while shifting with a standard manual, especially when you're going from 1st gear to 2nd. The nose of the Smart dives and your head pitches forward and then 2nd gear kicks in and acceleration resumes. The same thing happens with each gear, fortunately with declining intensity.

On a second day of driving the Smart, the transmission seemed to behave a bit more mannerly — perhaps a case of familiarity breeding competence, as you simply get used to it. But really this isn't the sort of neck-stretching acceleration we were hoping for, and we expect lots of people will think the same.

Rolling at Last

Once you get some momentum together, it's a pleasure to drive the Smart. Despite its short 73.5-inch wheelbase, the Fortwo absorbs bumps and potholes quite well. The ride quality isn't exactly as supple as a Maybach, but the motions are surprisingly gentle.

Since this car is as wide as it is tall and rides on substantial 15-inch tires, the Smart also feels surprisingly stable at speed. It's not a racecar, but we found it could handle the demands of cornering through a California freeway ramp.

The truth is, you quickly get used to the Smart. Soon you forget entirely that you're in a city-size package so short it can be parked perpendicular to the curb.

While its EPA rating hasn't been announced, Smart USA estimates the Fortwo will achieve 33 mpg in the city and 40 mpg on the highway. And the Fortwo's 8.7-gallon fuel tank should be good for 350 miles or so. But to achieve these results, the Smart's highly tuned engine requires pricey premium-grade gasoline. It will run on regular, but not as well, although we're not sure you'd feel it in the seat of your pants.

Safety First

Because the Smart is 9.5 inches shorter than even a Mini, it's easy to be concerned about safety, especially in the land of Ford F-250 pickup trucks. You do have a keen sense of your own mortality while driving on the freeway, largely because you're not sure you can swerve out of the way when something big and dangerous doesn't catch sight of you in its rearview mirrors.

The '08 model represents the second generation of the Smart. The first car, launched in Europe in 1998, passed U.S. crash tests, even though it was never brought here for sale. While this model hasn't yet been tested by regulators, it's been designed to meet a higher standard of crashworthiness.

Daimler crashed its Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan headlong into a Smart Fortwo at 31 mph and the Smart's crash test dummies emerged without catastrophic injury. And we were shown a Smart that had been in a test that simulated a rear impact from a full-size car traveling at 50 mph. The Smart's rear end and right quarter panel were a mess, but the damage didn't intrude into the passenger area.

Part of the secret is that the occupants are encircled by a cage of high-strength steel, which works much like an energy-absorbing safety cage. Further interior safety features include two front-mounted airbags and two seat-mounted side airbags plus a knee pad. ABS brakes and stability control are standard equipment, and both brake assist and hill-start assist are part of the stability system's calibration. Indeed, the Smart is cheaper to insure in Europe than a conventional car, Smart's Dave Schembri told us.

Size Shouldn't Matter

At first look, the Smart seems too small to be practical. It's not. Rather, it is a marvel of packaging efficiency.

The engine and drivetrain are tucked under the passenger compartment. With the bulk of its weight so close to the ground, the Smart can be tall and provide both a high seating position and lots of headroom without the threat of toppling over in a corner.

Dimensionally, the Smart's passenger compartment compares well to the front seat area of larger subcompacts such as the Mini and the Honda Fit. Its 39.7 inches of headroom offers almost an inch more clearance than a Mini and an inch less than the Fit. Its 41.2 inches of legroom compares to 41.4 inches in the Mini and 41.9 inches in the Fit.

Only in shoulder room does the Smart require some compromise, offering just 48 inches compared to the Mini's 50.3 and the Fit's 52.8 inches. But packaging efficiency comes to the rescue because the passenger seat is offset 5 inches rearward to minimize shoulder-rubbing. And it folds flat to increase cargo space when there's no passenger.

With both seats up, cargo space is 7.8 cubic feet, and if you can stack stuff to the roof it increases to 12 cubic feet.

Setting Trends, or Just for Trendsetters?

The 2008 Smart Fortwo will appeal to those who see themselves as trendsetters and to city dwellers who feel the need for a small and easy-to-park conveyance, and we think it's going to generate a huge amount of media buzz. But the Smart's small size is going to challenge the perceptions and assumptions of a lot of people.

When the Smart was first conceived more than a decade ago by Swatch watch magnate Nicolas Hayek, he hoped it would reinvent the automobile in the same way his disposable watch had reinvented wristwatches. But the struggle to bring the concept to market revealed that it's just as expensive to bring a cheap car to market as an expensive one. And indeed the $11,590 price of the entry-level Smart Fortwo Pulse is close to that of several conventional subcompacts including the Fit, Nissan Versa and Toyota Yaris. Also the Smart carries only a two-year bumper-to-bumper warranty.

Yet automotive entrepreneur Roger Penske is Smart's U.S. distributor, and he's not a man known for poor business decisions. We think his Smart USA won't have much trouble hitting its initial sales goal of 25,000 a year. But growth after that could be a struggle unless gas prices create a panic.


First Drive: 2008 Smart Fortwo Passion


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[Bartek S.]

Full Test: 2008 Smart Fortwo Passion





Get Your Smiles Here (and Park Anywhere)
The 2008 Smart Fortwo has the highest SPM (smiles per mile) factor of any car we've ever driven. We spent a week behind the wheel of the world's shortest production car, but it took only about 20 minutes to realize that it would be hard to do wrong in a car that seems to make everyone happy.

Want to drive down the Strand in Venice Beach? Go ahead. The cops might encourage you to leave, but they're not going to give you a ticket. How about parking sideways in your neighbor's driveway overnight? We did it. They thought it was so cute they brought us breakfast and wanted a ride. The 2008 Smart Fortwo disarms the angry, calms the uptight and relieves the anxious.

That's just how it works with the Fortwo. Everyone notices. In a country filled with SUV-driving 'Mericans listening to Britney Spears on the radio, this tiny, distinctly European machine can't be overlooked. It gets attention like a chrome-plated Lamborghini — only the right kind of attention, not the wrong kind.

Why They Notice
With proportions approximating a cube more than any other car ever built, it's hard not to notice the Smart. Its wheelbase is almost 2 feet (23.6 inches) shorter than that of a Mini Cooper, and there's nothing else in the U.S. that can match such bizarre dimensions. And there's not another car anywhere with an overall length of only 106.1 inches, which, just so you know, is only 5 inches longer than a Hummer H1 is wide. The Fortwo is 61.3 inches wide — about 8 inches narrower than a Mazda 3.

Surprisingly, all this squareness doesn't make the 2008 Smart Fortwo ugly. Well, not to anyone we ran into, anyway. The odd proportions elegantly incorporate a large greenhouse — both the front and rear glass is huge and there's a large polycarbonate "panorama" roof that has a retractable cover. The idea for the Smart began with the entrepreneur behind Swatch watches, and the wheeled cube still has the dizzy colors and proportions of a Swatch.

Massive doors fill the void in the side of the tridion safety cell. "Tridion" is Smart-speak for the car's rigid main structure, which is designed to match up with a conventional vehicle's crumple zones in an impact. The Fortwo's front wheels are designed as part of its front crumple zone and its engine absorbs energy in a rear-end collision.

There are four airbags — two dual-stage units up front and one side airbag in the outer bolster of each seat to protect the head and thorax of the occupants.

Intelligent Interior
More smiles were generated inside our test car, where we were amazed by the available space. Much like Dr. Who's TARDIS time machine, there's more room inside than the vehicle's exterior dimensions seem to allow. This is a very good thing.

An upright seating position helps furnish excellent visibility in every direction, including up. There's ample room for even the largest of drivers — and their luggage. We loaded two adults, two briefcases, a large camera bag and a camera tripod in the Fortwo and had room to spare. A full-size suitcase plus other cargo will fit behind the seats.

If you choose not to carry a passenger, the unused seatback can be folded flat to accommodate larger cargo like golf bags. Unfortunately, the lever to release the seatback is on the inside hinge, which forces the poor soul doing the folding to sort out the physics of reaching it when the seat is folded halfway. It's usually accomplished after a few awkward contortions, which didn't make us smile. The rear glass and tailgate are a better design and open in a clamshell fashion, which is much easier to use.

The orange cloth covering most interior surfaces in our test car made us feel a little like being inside an orange peel with windows, but we liked it. A tachometer and clock sit in separate housings on top of the dashboard, and they (curiously enough) can be aimed independently toward either the passenger or driver. The instrument panel has an optimistic 100-mph speedometer, although top speed is electronically limited to 90 mph.

Controls for heating and ventilation as well as the audio system are refreshingly simple and efficient to use.

Smart Guts
A Mitsubishi-built, 1.0-liter three-cylinder power plant generates 70 horsepower and 68 pound-feet of torque, and it sits out of sight beneath the rear deck, where it's mounted transversely. It drives the rear wheels through a five-speed automated sequential-shift manual transmission.

Like many transmissions of this type, the automated manual isn't as good as a conventional manual or a conventional automatic. It has two modes: automatic, which makes gear choices on its own based on throttle position and load; and manual, which allows manual upshifts and even makes a pathetic attempt at rev-matched downshifts. The biggest problem is the sluggish shift speed, and it leaves driver and passenger trading puzzled looks between gears. This transmission simply shifts too slowly, and there's nothing a driver can do about it.

Compounding the problem is the fact that 70 hp isn't really enough power for American roads — even in a car that weighs 1,804 pounds. Around town we found ourselves using full throttle to keep up with traffic, while on the freeway the power deficit is too often a frustrating liability.

The Smart Experience
Otherwise, the Fortwo is enjoyable to drive. Despite its weight and size, it's not engaging like a sports car, yet it's free of the burdens of larger, heavier vehicles. The steering is slow, yet offers enough feel of the road to make the Smart predictable and easy to manage. And despite the fact that much of the Smart's center of gravity is relatively high, we never got the sense that it was unstable.

Thanks to the Smart, finding a place to park went from being a necessary evil to a unique challenge. We parked the Fortwo perpendicular to the curb in areas where curb-parallel parking was the norm without impeding traffic. Enforcement agents drove by and smiled.

The Smart's suspension features struts up front and a DeDion axle out back, and the combination does a decent job of taming inputs from road imperfections. The car's overall ride quality is good, but the highway ride does get busy as speeds increase. By 80 mph, any surface that isn't glass smooth will keep you engaged with the challenge of simply keeping the Smart centered in its lane. There's not a lot of compression travel in the dampers, so slowing down for large bumps is a necessity.

Smart but Slow
At the track, the notion that the Fortwo's minimal weight might make it reasonably quick vaporized faster than frowns at Disneyland. How's a 19.4-second quarter-mile at 68.8 mph sound? To us, it sounds like we'd better never merge onto the freeway in front of a Peterbilt with worn brake linings. More than 14 of these seconds (14.1 to be exact) are used to achieve 60 mph. That, friends, is slow — 4.8 seconds slower than a Honda Fit, which isn't known for its sprinting ability.

The Smart's test numbers for handling numbers are similarly uninspiring. The relatively low threshold of intervention by the non-defeatable stability control (the Fortwo comes with ABS, traction control and stability control as standard equipment) keeps the handling limits lower than we expected for a car this size. Around our 200-foot-diameter skid pad, the Fortwo manages only 0.74g. It weaves through the slalom cones at 59.1 mph. Since the Smart is equipped with good-size Continental ContiProContact tires (155/60R15s in front and 175/55R15s in the rear), we expected more.

The Smart's braking performance is adequate, but pedal feel and response from the bottom-hinged pedal is strange. The Smart stops in 124 feet from 60 mph, a distance that identically matches the performance of the Honda Fit.

Rated by the EPA's 2008 calculation at 33 mpg in the city and 40 mpg on the highway, the Smart isn't as economical as its looks might lead you to believe. Our test car produced 37.2 mpg in mixed driving.

Smart Money?
The price of the 2008 Smart Fortwo Passion Coupe starts at $13,590 plus the $645 destination fee. A cabriolet version is available for $3,000 more. Our coupe had $780 in options including two paint upgrades, an upgraded radio, foglamps and the multidirectional dash-mounted tachometer and clock, all of which brought its total to $15,015.

We like the Smart. It's fun in a goofy sort of way and provides endless opportunities to entertain both neighbors and random onlookers. Problem is, we can't help but think this novelty will wear thin with time. A similarly priced Honda Fit or Toyota Yaris offers better performance, more functional space and almost identical fuel economy for about the same money.

But neither of those cars can match the Smart's SPM factor.

The manufacturer provided Edmunds this vehicle for the purposes of evaluation.
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