HappyBeagle.com Road Test: The Smart fortwo Coupe
(Click on any of the pictures to get a larger version of that image.)
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| Welcome to the HappyBeagle.com automotive department -- where we review the exotic, high-performance automobiles that you just can't get in the United States. For this episode, we'll be reviewing the Smart fortwo Coupe. We rented the diesel-engined (packing a whopping 41 HP) "passion" model; you can get one from your local Smart dealer for 12,095 Euro, without accessories.
The Smart coupe has two main selling points: terrific gas mileage, and (most important in a city environment) the fact that it's small enough that you can park it anywhere -- stuff it in the space between two normal-sized cars! Park it in the gap between the last parked car and a driveway! Park it up on the sidewalk!
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| Front and rear views of the car. With sixti's tasteful, understated advertising, only the observant can tell that it's a rental car! |
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The spacious interior (which has a far better driving position for tall people than Shelby's Miata, the only two-seater I'm familiar with).
The rear window pops open to give you access to a vast amount of behind-the-seat storage space -- the only storage space there is!
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| A closer look at the dashboard. |
You can just manage to peg the Smart's speedometer at its topmost speed of 140 km/h (84 mph); with the slightest bit of strong wind, anything above about 120 km/h (72 mph) feels pretty sketchy. After only a short while on the Autobahn, my wrists began to feel sore from constantly having to provide sudden sharp course corrections as the car was pushed about. |
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| A clock and tachometer sprout out of the top of the center console like eyestalks from an alien dashboard-being. You can spin them around to face any direction you'd like. |
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The tachometer remains important with the Smart's hybrid part-manual, part-automatic transmission. In manual mode, you push the stick forward to shift up a gear, and pull the stick back to shift down. The transmission has a certain amount of intelligence, to make driving a manual less tedious and to save you from yourself; it automatically downshifts at stoplights, and if you keep the accelerator pressed down without shifting, it'll eventually shift into the next highest gear. In the middle of the speedometer is a gear indicator that occasionally changes into an up-arrow or a down-arrow when it thinks you should shift up or down; follow its recommendations, and you'll be redlining a lot (it was insistently blinking down, down, down while I was travelling at 80 mph in sixth gear).
Press the button on the side of the stick to turn the car into the world's clunkiest automatic.
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| Quick review of sixti.de (our automotive source for this review):
As you can see if you visit their website (or from the giant stickers plastered across our rental car), Sixti likes to lead you on with their "from 5 Euro/day" tagline. The key word here is from -- here are some of the things preventing you from getting the magic 5 Euro rate:
- The price of the rental depends on how far in advance you book the car. The later you book, the more expensive the price -- you may have to book up to two months in advance to get the five Euro rate!
- The rental only includes 100 km (60 miles) mileage per day. Go farther, pay more. In my case, I burned a significant amount of kilometers just getting from the Sixti office to the Autobahn across town. (Only those high-cost, all-the-frills rental car agencies have more than one office per city.)
- Due to their low-staff, low-service, low-price model, you have to return the car clean inside and out, or you're charged an extra 15 Euro. Scout's Hundehotel is at the end of a dirt road -- so today, even though it was raining, I had to take my Smart through a gas-station car wash before the Sixti office would accept it penalty-free.
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| Small dog in small car. |
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| This page last modified on Tuesday, April 06, 2004 |
| Go to: HappyBeagle.com • HappyBeagle's picture pages • Shelby's Blog • Kevin's Blog |
