The Smart ForTwo is a car that's been left behind in the competitive compact-car segment, and it's not hard to figure out why.
The ForTwo is the only car I've driven that I can't recommend to anyone. It's not that I dislike everything about the Smart; some things are — OK. It's just that the car comes with so many quirks, compromises and faults that the cons kill it in my book.
For a long time, two of the only reasons to buy a small car were that you couldn't afford something better or you wanted better gas mileage. In that light, the ForTwo's estimated 41 mpg on the highway and its sub-$13,000 starting price look interesting. The catch, though, is that many 2012 small cars hit 40 mpg on the highway, including the Chevrolet Sonic, Ford Focus, Honda Civic, Hyundai Accent and Kia Rio. True, some of those cars require you to purchase a special version to get that mileage, but the point is, 40 mpg isn't the ceiling it once was. There are also several small cars available near that $13K price.
Many competitors also have things the tiny ForTwo doesn't — like rear seats. That means the best cards in the ForTwo's hand — mileage and price — have been trumped, and it doesn't boast much else to woo drivers.
Error in Transmission
The first flaw is the car's transmission. I'm far from the only one to harp on the Smart's transmission, but the issues aren't just mechanical; the way it's marketed is misleading.
The transmission is an automated manual one, meaning it shifts gears as a manual transmission would: You feel the clutch disengage, the gear changes and then you feel the clutch re-engage. The nose of the car dips slightly as the clutch disengages, just as a car with a stick shift does when someone is learning to drive a manual transmission. While there's nothing wrong with this in theory, in practice the shifts take too long.
Also, the transmission is woefully inconsistent. After a week of driving the thing, I never achieved consistent acceleration and shifting. The ForTwo does seem to prefer a light touch of the gas pedal, but its shift points were all over the map. That inconsistency — more than the slow shifting and lurching — bothered me the most the more I drove the Smart. And by "bothered" I mean "enraged."
But, like I say, part of the problem is in the marketing: Calling this transmission "automatic" or even "automated" is misleading. It doesn't function like an automatic anything. It doesn't work best when you put it in Drive and mindlessly mash the gas pedal; it works best when you select the gears yourself via either the gearshift or the shift paddles on the steering wheel. Once I figured that out — and committed to driving the Smart only that way — I was much more pleased with the results. The shifts still took too long and there was still a lurch, but at least I knew when it was all going to happen.
If Smart called its gearbox a sequential manual transmission it would be more accurate: You'd get the hint that you need to drive the car, just as you would one with a manual transmission.
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